Phillips aims to break its own £31.5m record
Colin Gleadell sees the third-placed auctioneer upping its game with its most valuable UK sale yet
The last Matisse sculpture from this edition to come to auction sold for £6.9million in New York in 2001
Wrestling market share from Sotheby’s and Christie’s must seem nigh on impossible to third-placed art auctioneer Phillips. For the past two years, and in spite of a number of high-profile staff signings, its share has remained static at 5.6 per cent.
The only answer is to keep upping its game; which is what it is doing. Indeed, as this year’s major auctions of impressionist, modern and contemporary art approach, it is becoming apparent that Phillips is assembling its most valuable sale in London yet. The previous high for a single sale at Phillips in London was the £31.5million achieved for contemporary art in October 2015, and with one week still to go before it closes entries, it is already looking at a much higher pre-sale estimate.
This is partly due to an increase in the modern art content of its sale. Whereas Phillips used to be focused on selling contemporary, cuttingedge art, since 2016 it has broadened its scope with a combined 20th century and contemporary art sale category. It took a while to take effect, but, last November in New York, led by the sale of drawings by Picasso and Matisse from the collection of Elvis Presley’s music publisher, Julian J Aberbach, modern art accounted for 18 per cent of the sale’s $114million (£82million) total. In London this March, that percentage could more than double.
A report by auction analysts Arttactic calculates that impressionist and modern art (mainly at Sotheby’s and Christie’s) accounted for $2.4billion (£1.73billion) of global sales last year, an increase of 64.5 per cent on the previous year. Now, Phillips is looking to cash in on that swing with another combination of works by Picasso and Matisse.
Possibly the find of the forthcoming sales is a 1907 bronze of a reclining nude, Nu Allongé I (Aurore) by Matisse, the whereabouts of which have been unknown since it was last exhibited in 1915. Numbered three out of 10 casts, it was one of the first from the edition to be cast from its plaster mould – a mark of prestige among collectors. Others from the edition were cast until 1951 and are held in collections in Paris and the US. While all of these other casts have a shiny surface from years of protective waxing, number three’s more matt finish is much closer to its original state. The last Matisse sculpture from this edition to come to auction was number eight, cast in 1930, which sold at Phillips in New York in 2001, for $9.6million (£6.9million) – currently the highest auction price for these bronzes. This is why the owners of number three chose to sell at Phillips rather than Sotheby’s or Christie’s, though its estimate, at £5-£7million pounds, seems relatively conservative.
Nu Allongé I (Aurore) was made at the point when figurative art began embracing abstraction – a historic moment in the evolution of modern art. Tracing the sources of Matisse’s inspiration, American scholar Charles Stuckey compares the piece to nothing less than Michelangelo’s Aurora, the reclining female sculpture executed in the 1520s for the Medici Chapel in Florence, to sit aside the tomb of Lorenzo de’ Medici.
Stuckey also draws a connection between the Matisse bronze and Phillips’ other star modern art offering – a large, languorous painting by Picasso of his lover, Marie-thérèse Walter, sleeping. It was painted in 1932, at a time when Picasso had recently returned to looking at Matisse’s sculptures, his admiration for which led to the series of paintings of Marie-thérèse that will be shown at Tate Modern in March, as part of an exhibition devoted to 1932 – Picasso’s so-called “annus mirabilis”. One of these paintings previously sold for over $100million (£72million), but the Phillips example, perhaps because it is part drawing, part painting, is estimated at £12-16million.
Some have asserted that Phillips can challenge the big auction houses only by offering sellers financial guarantees to encourage a sale. But neither the Matisse nor the Picasso has been guaranteed. Furthermore, the unaggressive estimates have been made to encourage bidding and fetch higher prices, thus placing Phillips firmly in the competition to sell prime examples of modern art.