As is customary, Phillips brought Frieze Week evening sales to a close in London on Thursday, this time with a 31-lot auction of Modern and contemporary art that came in just below estimate, at £15.1 million ($19.8 million), a 17.5-percent drop from last year’s £18.3 million. The house may be able to make up some of that ground on Friday at its day sale, which looks stronger than last year’s.

The sale started well enough, with the first auction appearance of a work by the young London-based figurative painter Joseph Yaeger, which attracted at least seven bidders before selling for £203,200 ($265,000), an order of magnitude above its £20,000-£30,000 estimate ($26,100-$39,200). The competitors included an online bidder from China and the American actor Alex de Persia, spotted by onetime gallerist Josh Baer in his Baer Faxt. Yaeger, who is American, just signed with Gladstone.

A new kid on the block: Joseph Yaeger’s Sphinx without a secret (2021), which went for £203,200 ($265,000), some 10 times its low estimate.

One of the distinctive features of Yaeger’s practice is his use of filmic imagery. Another is his use of watercolor. Let’s hope the new owner of Sphinx Without a Secret (2021), whose title comes from a theatrical Oscar Wilde short story about a femme fatale, keeps it away from bright light, which will cause it to fade.

Other works exceeding expectations were few and far between. Coming from the collection of the Australian billionaire Naomi Milgrom, New York Mercantile Exchange (2000), a digitally manipulated photographic print by Andreas Gursky doubled its estimates to sell to an online bidder from Florida for £609,000 ($795,000)—the highest price for a Gursky at auction in seven years.

A painting of an adolescent girl, So Bored (2019), by Gagosian’s Anna Weyant also exceeded its top estimate to sell for £266,700 ($349,000).

Marcel Broodthaers’s Eloge du Sujet (1974) made triple its estimate, finishing at $498,000.

But perhaps the most impressive over-performance was by Eloge du Sujet (1974), a rare assemblage of common objects, like a bottle, a handbag, and a palette mirror, arranged and labelled like a museum display by the Belgian conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaers. It sold for a triple-estimate £381,000 ($498,000).

Conceptual art has a backseat in the market behind movements like Minimalism and Pop, and great examples are usually the terrain of museums. The auction record for Broodthaers remains £396,000 ($759,500), set at Christie’s in 1992 for his eggshell-laden Armoire Blanche et Table Blanche (1965), which was acquired by Ronald Lauder as a promised gift to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it resides.

I don’t know who bought the work at Phillips, but it was underbid by the Geneva-based consultant Philippe Davet, who works with the venerable former head of Modern art at Sotheby’s, Paris, Marc Blondeau. What made the piece especially attractive for a serious collector is that it belonged for 50 years to the highly respected Broodthaers connoisseurs Jost and Barbara Herbig. Other works from their collection will be sold at Phillips tomorrow.

Otherwise, prices showed a market treading water. Banksy’s Untitled (Fuck the Police), 2020, which was guaranteed, sold without competition on its low estimate for £635,000 ($829,000) with fees; before buyer’s premium, the result was about equal to the £500,000 (fees included) it made in 2019.

Andreas Gursky’s New York, Mercantile Exchange (2000), which sold for £609,600
($797,000).

A green cut canvas by Lucio Fontana, one of yesterday’s top blue-chip postwar artists, showed no gain over the £890,500 it made 11 years ago, and a large Damien Hirst butterfly painting, Omnipotence (2008), sold for £444,500 ($580,000), quite a lot less than the £769,900 it fetched just two years ago at Phillips.

Better performers included a small Andy Warhol, Guns (1981), which sold for £571,500 ($747,230), a touch above the $605,000 that its seller paid for it 10 years ago (never mind inflation and maintenance costs since then), and White Cube artist Liu Ye’s super kitsch Girl and Piggy (1999), which went for £749,000 ($978,000), below its estimate but still twice what it made 10 years ago in Hong Kong.

Also treading water were hot young artists who reliably jumped their estimates not too long ago, like Francesca Mollet, Michaela Yearwood-Dan, and Jenna Gribbon. All their paintings sold within estimates.

There was also no lift off for the top lots. David Hockney’s 2005 landscape Path through Wheat Field, July (£3.3 million, $4.31 million) and Tracey Emin’s 2018 This is Life Without You… (£889,000, $1.16 million) finished strictly to their estimated ranges. The fireworks that might have been there a year ago were absent.