Will £14m Miró make Phillips a contender?
The paintings denote ‘a time when the Nazis wanted to destroy all that man holds precious in life’
News has been coming through of some multi-million-dollar paintings up for sale at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in New York this November. But what about Phillips, the outsider, trying to get a seat at the top table?
The auctioneer has attempted to break the duopoly before – 20 years ago when Bernard Arnault (the owner of luxury-goods conglomerate LVMH and France’s richest man) bought Phillips. But the attempt backfired, and LVMH lost hundreds of millions. Arnault thought he could buy his way in by guaranteeing owners such as Berlin collector Heinz Berggruen large sums to give Phillips the chance of selling their masterpieces. But he found that enticing buyers to bid was not so easy. Who will forget the moment Sharon Stone, who was employed by Phillips to add glamour to the proceedings, sat on a potential buyer’s knee, but to no avail?
Admitting defeat, Arnault pulled out after three years, and it has not been until 2014, with the hiring of Ed Dolman, Christie’s former chief executive, that Phillips looked ready to try again. Now surrounded by a team of former Sotheby’s and Christie’s experts, Dolman’s Phillips not only had the bestselling rates at the London sales in March, but has been the most improved in terms of turnover.
Much of this was due to the advances it is making in the modern, early-20th-century market, where it is a relative newcomer. In March, it acquired valuable works by Picasso and a Matisse in London (with no inducements to the sellers) and sold them for a combined £50million, proving it’s not just Sotheby’s and Christie’s that can get great works for sale and obtain big prices.
Now, largely owing to Phillips’ success, it has been entrusted with Femme dans la Nuit, 22 March 1945, an $18million-plus (£13.7million) painting by Joan Miró, the surrealist master, for sale in New York – again without having to guarantee it. The work is one of a series of 14 large white paintings that Miró made in early 1945. Other examples are in museum collections in New York, Düsseldorf and Madrid. This one has been in the same private collection in Switzerland since the Seventies, and is only the third from this series to appear at auction since 1986, when another Femme Dans La Nuit, 1945, sold for a record $2.3million.
Since 1941, Miró had been living in semi-monastic conditions in Mallorca after fleeing from Nazi-occupied Paris, and painting only small-scale works on paper. With this series, he returned to a larger scale. It denoted, he said later, “a terrible time when they [the Nazis] wanted to destroy all that man holds precious in life”. On the day the Germans surrendered, he finished the last painting of the series.
The wartime context may explain some mysteries that surround the painting. Why is the night white – set alight by explosions? What are the black blobs and squiggles – are they smoke trails from shot-down aeroplanes, and bombs falling? What does the female figure on the left relate to? Is she derived from the onlookers in Picasso’s Guernica?
If it sells, Femme Dans La Nuit will be the most valuable example of modern art that Phillips has sold in New York since the Arnault regime in 2001, when its main achievement was to sell a version of Cézanne’s landscape of Mont St Victoire from the Berggruen collection to Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, for $38.5million. When it goes on show in London during Frieze week, it will remind the art-buying community that this time, Phillips is looking much more like a serious contender.