Thursday, March 19, 2009

Auction: Photographs, New York, April 1, 2009 @Phillips

Phillips offers its entry in the spring auction season with its Photographs sale (in two sessions) on April 1. There are a total of 279 lots in this sale, for a total estimate of $2908000; this is nearly 100 lots more than Sotheby's and more than twice as many as Christie's, but with the lowest total estimate value of the three. The data below shows just how weighted to the Low end this sale is. (Catalogue cover at right.)

Here's the breakdown:

Total Low lots (high estimate $10000 or lower): 204
Total Low estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): $1061000

Total Mid lots (high estimate between $10000 and $50000): 70
Total Mid estimate: $1347000

Total High lots (high estimate over $50000): 5
Total High estimate: $500000.

This sale includes the third installment of Robert Mapplethorpe's images of Lisa Lyon, as well as a selection of 67 generally lower priced prints from the collection of Anabel and E.J. Gonzalez (further explained by a short background essay).

While this sale has plenty of bulk (many later prints), there aren't many lots that jump out at us for our particular collection. There are several mixed lots with multiple images that we wish were being sold individually, so we could select out the ones we want and not be bothered with the rest. This potentially applies to Frank Gohlke (lots 36, and 37), Francesca Woodman (lot 196) and Carla van de Puttelaar (lot 213), but we'd need to see the prints that aren't illustrated in the catalogue to be sure.

The lot by lot catalogue can be found here.

Photographs
450 West 15th Street
New York, NY 10011

1 comment:

gphoto said...

I like Phillips Gavin Bond announcement card!

Think Phillips has done the best to show material on par with last year. The other two are depressing.