Andy Warhol, Flowers, 1964. Sold for £1,595,500. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London.
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso, La Minotauromachie, 1935. Sold for £975,000. Editions London.
Throughout his long and prolific career, the Spanish-born artist consistently pushed the boundaries of art to new extremes. Picasso's oeuvre is famously characterized by a radical diversity of styles, ranging from his early forays in Cubism to his Classical Period and his later more gestural expressionist work, and a diverse array of media including printmaking, drawing, ceramics and sculpture as well as theater sets and costumes designs.
Richard Avedon
Richard Avedon, Brigitte Bardot, hair by Alexandre, Paris, January 27, 1959. Sold for £212,500. Photographs London.
From the inception of Richard Avedon's career, first at Harper's Bazaar and later at Vogue, Avedon challenged the norms for editorial photography. His fashion work gained recognition for its seemingly effortless and bursting energy, while his portraits were celebrated for their succinct eloquence. "I am always stimulated by people," Avedon said, "almost never by ideas."
Gio Ponti
Gio Ponti, Prototype ‘Mariposa’ sofa, designed for the XI Milan Triennale, circa 1957. Sold for £252,000. Design London.
Among the most prolific talents to grace twentieth-century design, Gio Ponti defied categorization. Though trained as an architect, he made major contributions to the decorative arts, designing in such disparate materials as ceramics, glass, wood and metal. A gale force of interdisciplinary creativity, Ponti embraced new materials like plastic and aluminum but employed traditional materials such as marble and wood in original, unconventional ways.
In the industrial realm, he designed buildings, cars, machinery and appliances — notably, the La Cornuta espresso machine for La Pavoni — and founded the ADI (Industrial Designer Association). Among the most special works by Gio Ponti are those that he made in collaboration with master craftsmen such as the cabinetmaker Giordano Chiesa, the illustrator Piero Fornasetti and the enamellist Paolo de Poli.
Bulgari
Bulgari, A Very Fine Emerald and Diamond Ring. Sold for HK$3,125,000. Jewels & Jadeite.
In 1884, Bulgari opened its doors to the Italian people with its offering of jewelry and accessories. Bulgari's style takes from traditions in Greek and Roman craftsmanship to elegantly balance volume and subtlety. Later, in the late 1960s, Bulgari bridged classicism and modernity by introducing its seductive, now-iconic Serpenti collection of snake-shaped coil bracelets and watches. It is through its meticulous combination of influences that Bulgari has garnered an international and loyal high-profile clientele, which included Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn. These Hollywood stars have immortalized the house's unique gem-adorned bracelets, necklaces and earrings in rounded forms.
Helen Frankenthaler
Helen Frankenthaler, Off White Square, 1973. Sold for $3,720,500. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York.
Helen Frankenthaler was one of the most influential members of the second generation of Abstract Expressionists and had a considerable impact on the transition from the prevailing New York School sensibilities to the subsequent Color Field style. Frankenthaler first achieved widespread praise for the opaque, floating fields of color of her 1952 painting Mountain and Sea, created using a technique that involved pouring thinned paint onto untreated canvases that had been laid on the floor of her studio. This so-called “soak-stain” technique was an acclaimed overture to Frankenthaler’s tireless experimentations with other styles and media throughout her career, including work in ceramics, sculpture, and printmaking.
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol, Marilyn, 1967. Sold for $315,000. Editions & Works on Paper New York.
Andy Warhol was the leading exponent of the Pop Art movement in the U.S. in the 1960s. Following an early career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol achieved fame with his revolutionary series of silkscreened prints and paintings of familiar objects, such as Campbell's soup tins, and celebrities, such as Marilyn Monroe. Obsessed with popular culture, celebrity and advertising, Warhol created his slick, seemingly mass-produced images of everyday subject matter from his famed Factory studio in New York City. His use of mechanical methods of reproduction, notably the commercial technique of silk screening, wholly revolutionized art-making.
Patek Philippe
Patek Philippe, Ref. 6104R-001, A very fine, attractive and rare pink gold and diamond-set astronomical wristwatch with sky chart, phases and orbit of the moon and time of Meridian Passage of Sirius and of the Moon, date, circa 2018. Sold for HK$3,339,000. The Hong Kong Watch Auction: XI.
Well-known for the Graves Supercomplication — a highly complicated pocket watch that was the world’s most complicated watch for 50 years — this family-owned brand has earned a reputation of excellence around the world. Patek's complicated vintage watches hold the highest number of world records for results achieved at auction compared with any other brand. For collectors, key models include the reference 1518, the world's first serially produced perpetual calendar chronograph, and its successor, the reference 2499. Other famous models include perpetual calendars such as the ref. 1526, ref. 3448 and 3450, chronographs such as the reference 130, 530 and 1463, as well as reference 1436 and 1563 split seconds chronographs. Patek is also well-known for their classically styled, time-only "Calatrava" dress watches, and the "Nautilus," an iconic luxury sports watch first introduced in 1976 as the reference 3700 that is still in production today.
Lucie Rie
Lucie Rie, Footed bowl, circa 1978. Sold for $225,000. Design New York.
Dame Lucie Rie studied under Michael Powolny at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna before immigrating to London in 1938. In London she started out making buttons for the fashion industry before producing austere, sparsely decorated tableware that caught the attention of modernist interior decorators. Eventually she hit her stride with the pitch-perfect footed bowls and flared vases for which she is best-known today. She worked in porcelain and stoneware, applying glaze directly to the unfired body and firing only once. She limited decoration to incised lines, subtle spirals and golden manganese lips, allowing the beauty of her thin-walled vessels to shine through. In contrast with the rustic pots of English ceramicist Bernard Leach, who is considered an heir to the Arts and Crafts movement, collectors and scholars revere Rie for creating pottery that was in dialogue with the design and architecture of European Modernism.
Clyfford Still
Clyfford Still, PH-407, 1964. Sold for $18,442,500. 20th Century & Contemporary Art New York.
Much mythologized for his saturnine demeanor as much as for his searing artworks, Clyfford Still pioneered a unique form of abstraction influenced by the windswept plains of the barren Canadian prairie where he spent much of his childhood. Contrary to other leading Abstract Expressionists, Still applied paint to the canvas in thick, violent sheets using a palette knife, creating austere artworks marked by vulcanian veins of bright tones that rise turbulently out of fractured darkness. Still’s works emanate both a transcendent radiance and a studied fury, betraying the roaring sublimity and irascible intellectualism of the artist’s practice. He forged a singularly evocative visual language and quickly rose to great prominence in the art world; at the height of his success, however, he retreated into the Maryland countryside in monastic solitude and cut off all ties with his gallerists, as he was unwilling to compromise his artistic vision for monetary gain and skeptical of those who he thought might exploit it.
Cartier
Cartier, An Important Art Deco Diamond and Platinum Convertible Tiara. Sold for $352,800. Jewels New York.
With the Constitution of 1848 came a new standard for luxury in France. Founded one year prior by Louis-Francois Cartier, the house of Cartier was one of the first to use platinum in jewelry making. This incredibly expensive material became the stepping-stone for Cartier to experiment in form, mechanisms and attitude. It helped men move from pocket watches to wristwatches, effectively making the watch much more functional and prominent in a man's overall wardrobe.
Phillips 2020: Year In Review
In a very challenging year, Phillips rose to the occasion, fully embracing our digital-first ethos to hold an extraordinary set of live auctions which exploded company records across the globe. We brought new artists to auction, supported the charitable causes we care about, and launched the next-generation auction experience, Gallery One. We look forward to a bright 2021.
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