LONDON.- Phillips announced highlights in advance of the London Photographs auction on 19 May. Featuring 168 lots, the sale is led by Richard Avedon’s 1980 diptych Jesus Cervantes and Manuel Heredia, prisoners, Bexar County Jail, San Antonio, Texas, 6/5/80. Further leading lots include Peter Lindbergh's 1994 portrait of Kate Moss from the sold-out edition of 3, as well as celebrated works by Helmut Newton, Diane Arbus, and Irving Penn. This season's ULTIMATE will feature several stand-out works by Korean artists, including Byung-Hun Min, JeeYoung Lee, Jung Lee and auction newcomer Rala Choi. SPOTLIGHT: A Private London Collection, an exclusive selection of iconic works by some of the greatest photographers of the 20th and 21st centuries, will be offered in a standalone session at 4pm. The auction is online now and will be on view in Phillips London galleries on Berkeley Square from 12 May until the live auction on 19 May at 1pm and 4pm.
Yuka Yamaji, Head of Photographs, Europe, and Rachel Peart, Head of Department, London, said, “We are thrilled to present our Spring London auction, led by Richard Avedon’s monumental diptych from his seminal project In the American West, which is appearing at auction for the first time. Further highlights include important and pivotal works from master photographers of the 20th Century such as Irving Penn, Diane Arbus, Helmut Newton and Peter Lindbergh. The 17th edition of ULTIMATE presents collectors with a curated selection of exclusive works available for sale only at Phillips, including sold-out works from Zanele Muholi, Jungjin Lee and Markus Brunetti. Of the 12 featured artists, eight are women. We are also honoured to present SPOTLIGHT, an exceptional selection of works from a private London collection, featuring icons of fashion, film, music, and art. We look forward to welcoming visitors to view the pre-sale exhibition and attend the sale in person this May.”
Leading the sale this May and offered at auction for the first time is Richard Avedon’s striking, monumental diptych Jesus Cervantes and Manuel Heredia, prisoners of Bexar County Jail, San Antonio, Texas. From 1979 to 1984, Avedon photographed extensively for a commission from the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, culminating in the seminal exhibition and book In the American West. He travelled all over America and photographed 752 people, deliberately seeking out and photographing individuals who have historically been overlooked by society. When speaking with inmates at Bexar County Jail, Avedon found that many of them, including the featured subjects, Jesus Cervantes and Manuel Heredia, had religious tattoos. Symbols of faith, culture, and tradition, the religious tattoos on full display render this larger than life-sized diptych striking not only for the context of Cervantes’ and Heredia’s lives, but also because Avedon has portrayed them against his signature white backdrop, transforming them into symbolic figures.
A highlight of the sale is Peter Lindbergh’s 1994 portrait of Kate Moss. Pictured here aged 20, Moss was already causing a sensation in the fashion industry, despite still being in the early years of her hugely successful career. Lindbergh’s enduring portrait of Moss is characteristic of his simple, natural, and effortless style in which subjects wore little to no makeup and had modest hairstyles. Moss as seen here is candid and relaxed with a strap of her dress loosely hanging off her arm. This pared-back approach was radical in the context of 1990s fashion photography and the heavy styling of supermodels for magazine photoshoots popular at that time. This portrait was the lead image for ‘A Star Is Born’ in the December 1994 issue of Harper’s Bazaar.
The sale features two iconic lots by Helmut Newton: Rue Aubriot, Paris, 1975 and Big Nude: Yuko, Camilla, Raquel, Una and Verina, 1993. In Rue Aubriot, Paris we see Newton’s distinct style of eroticism, a striking woman subverting 1970s gender stereotypes in a sophisticated tuxedo alongside a powerful nude woman. Rue Aubriot is in Paris’ Marais district, at that time well known for prostitution, and in this image, Newton reclaims the space with female power and dominance emanating from his two subjects. A further Newton highlight is the complete set of his most-inclusive Big Nudes – Yuko, Camilla, Raquel, Una and Verina – published in 1994 by Galerie Sho and first exhibited at the Tokyo gallery in the same year.
Highlights of the 17th edition of ULTIMATE this Spring are works from five South Korean artists, four of which are new to Phillips, including JeeYoung Lee, Jung Lee, and auction newcomer Rala Choi.
JeeYoung Lee’s Resurrection is from the artist’s Stage of Mind series, which has been exhibited internationally, including at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, the Singapore Art Museum and the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego. Resurrection explores the meaning of death and rebirth, taking inspiration from the Korean folktale of Shim Cheong, a young woman who drowns herself in the sea and comes back to life inside a blooming lotus. Lee set the stage by filling her studio with handmade paper lotuses before flooding the space with fog and dry ice and casting herself as the protagonist. A print of this image is held at the Incheon Foundation for Arts & Culture in South Korea.
Jung Lee explores the power of words through her text-based neon installations set in natural landscapes; sculptural pieces featuring thought-provoking words or phrases that provide striking contrast to their setting of stark plains or snow fields. The artist’s work has been exhibited at the Seoul Museum of Art, and her work resides in the prestigious Burger Collection, Hong Kong. Notable collaborations include the album cover for Maroon 5’s V in 2014 and a neon installation for the launch of Yves Saint Laurent’s flagship store in Seoul in 2021.
The sale also includes two lifetime prints from a curated selection of five exceptional portraits of women by Diane Arbus, which come to auction this May from an important UK collection. One of the lifetime prints is a fresh-to- auction portrait of an Elizabeth Taylor look-alike. Taken when Arbus was in London in 1969, this portrait was
part of an assignment for pioneering women’s magazine Nova and an article on ‘People Who Think They Look Like Other People’ in which Arbus photographed people who thought they looked like celebrities.
Irving Penn’s Cuzco Children, Peru, is a further highlight of the sale, which comes to auction this May from a private European collection. Taken in 1948 on a trip to Peru with Vogue, Penn photographed the local people he met, capturing them at ease in their immediate surroundings rather than in a fixed studio space, and without the exoticization with which South American people had traditionally been portrayed. The present work features a young brother and sister, emanating a quiet confidence with their hands interlaced. The result is a relaxed, candid, and arresting image which represents a turning point in the photographer’s celebrated career as he began to move away from traditional studio photography towards allowing his subjects to be depicted more naturally.
Four sold-out works by acclaimed visual activist Zanele Muholi will be presented in the auction this May, including Sindile II which features in ULTIMATE. Sindile II is part of Muholi’s Somnyama Ngonyama series in which the artist becomes their own subject by transforming into characters that reference the politics of identity and the compounded suppression experienced because of racism and homophobia. In Sindile II the artist poses lying on the bed of room 206 in Berlin’s Fjord Hotel. Unlike other images from the series, in which their pose, gaze, choice of prop, and setting explicitly denote strength and composure, this work suggests vulnerability and quiet introspection. Muholi is a 2016 recipient of a Chevalier from l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and an Infinity Award from ICP, and their work resides in prominent institutions such as Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and Tate Modern, where Muholi’s first major UK exhibition was held in 2020- 2021.
