NEW YORK, NY.- Phillips announced highlights from the upcoming auctions of 20th Century & Contemporary Art. The Evening Sale will take place on Wednesday, 16 November, at 5pm and the Day Sale will follow on 17 November at 11am. Comprised of 37 lots, the Evening Sale is expected to realize in excess of $100 million and will be led by Gerhard Richter’s Dϋsenjäger, Roy Lichtenstein’s Nudes in Mirror, and Clyfford Still’s Untitled. Important works by masters such as David Hockney, Alexander Calder, and Carmen Herrera will also be featured, along with five works from the personal collection of Tommy Hilfiger. The Day Sale will offer 147 lots by some of the most acclaimed artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Robert Rauschenberg, George Condo, and Kara Walker, presenting collectors with a wonderful opportunity to grow their collections at all levels.

Robert Manley and Jean-Paul Engelen, Phillips’ Co-Heads of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, said, “From Richter’s photorealist and abstract works, to Lichtenstein’s iconic pop art images, to Calder’s mobiles, Phillips’ November sales of 20th Century & Contemporary Art present an exciting and diverse array of works that highlight some of the most significant movements of the past century. The high caliber of artwork on offer this season by these blue-chip masters underscores the strength of the market on the heels of our successful London sales just last month.”

The Evening Sale
Leading the Evening Sale on 16 November is Gerhard Richter’s photorealist Düsenjäger, one of the earliest of Richter’s recognized works. The painting dates from 1963, the most important juncture in his career, when he began to create the Photo Paintings that were to garner wide recognition. Düsenjäger was completed as part of the artist’s small and celebrated group of warplane pictures and was included in the artist’s landmark retrospective at The Art Institute of Chicago in 2002. The painting, estimated at $25-35 million, was last sold at auction in 2007 and set a record auction price for the artist of $11.2 million.

Roy Lichtenstein’s Nudes in Mirror stands as one of the best iterations from the artist’s celebrated Nudes series. The work offers a nude figure on a dramatic scale rendered in his signature Benday dots. Gently toying with her hair, the woman gazes dreamily in a mirror that ostensibly captures her own likeness, but also reflects a duplicated image at the mirror’s edge. While the stolen glimpse of a woman is a recurring theme in Western art, the voyeur’s gaze has always been a man’s. In his Nudes , Lichtenstein has taken this classical narrative and subverted it. Ironically, the male gaze is largely absent in this series—unless the mirror here is a symbol of the artist’s presence. Lichtenstein has placed the viewer in the position of the nude woman looking at herself, who is also in view of the second woman in the work, thereby replacing the male gaze with the female. In 2005, Nudes in Mirror was exhibited at Austria’s Kunsthaus Bregenz, where it was famously vandalized. The painting has since undergone a meticulous restoration and the art historical significance of the work remains unchanged. With so few examples from the Nudes series in public hands, this auction will provide collectors with the rare prospect of acquiring such an important work.

Coming to auction for the first time is an exceptional work by Clyfford Still, one of the foremost pioneers of Abstract Expressionism. The Untitled canvas from 1948/49 represents a moment when its maker – based then in San Francisco and teaching at the California School of Fine Arts – was at the height of his career. Still gave the painting to the artist Edward Dugmore, who had been one of his leading students. The picture is an extraordinary jigsaw of vibrant, flame-like color and haunting, half-seen painterly wraiths. David Anfam, curator of the current Abstract Expressionism exhibition at the Royal Academy, has written about this painting, stating “its chromatic heat and concomitant luminosity has more than a touch of hell fire and uplift to it.” With more than 95% of Still’s oeuvre held by the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, it is incredibly rare to see a work of this caliber come to auction.

Also included in the Evening Sale is David Hockney’s The Gate, a stunning domestic landscape executed on a grand scale from the artist’s later oeuvre. Like Henri Matisse’s Fauvist Road at Biskra, 1906, Hockney uses a high-keyed palette of electrifying color, which at first may seem unnatural to the viewer, but to the artist these colors were there in the original scene. Matisse’s color was derived from the immediacy of the glance, the intensity of the sun within the scene, whereas Hockney’s is drawn out of intense looking and reflection. Perspective in The Gate has been skewed to create a faux-illusionistic space that barely exists within the picture plane, but which is understood by the viewer to exist in reality. The Gate highlights Hockney’s myriad influences and interests, from stage-set design to photography, digital media to Old Master painting, Los Angeles to London.

Cerulean, 1965 is a pristine example of Carmen Herrera’s seven-decade career. The Cuban-born Herrera, who studied in Paris and exhibited alongside Piet Mondrian, eventually settled in New York in the 1950s, befriending Barnett Newman, Leon Polk Smith and Wilfredo Lam. The present work incorporates two of Herrera’s most significant artistic discoveries: the hand-painted frame and the dynamic diamond shape, which creates a feeling of three dimensional projection and levitation of form. Describing her paintings as “cut in space,” Herrera’s early interest in wood carving and architecture clearly informed her signature style. Calling architecture her “first love,” the discipline contributed to the three dimensional structure of her canvases. At age 101, Herrera is currently the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art – long overdue recognition of the artist’s significance in the art historical canon.

The Evening Sale will also include Richard Prince’s 2003 work, I Went t o the Doctor (estimate: $2,000,000-3,000,000). A successor of his groundbreaking monochrome Joke paintings conceived in the late 1980s, this work perfectly coalesces Prince’s hallmark appropriation of popular culture with the sumptuous palette and “high art” handling of paint celebrated in his Nurses , conceived that same year.