Phillips closed the 2026 New York spring auction season on May 19 with a sold-out Modern & Contemporary Evening Sale that hammered $115.2 million — more than double its 2025 equivalent and the house’s highest evening-sale total since the 2022 cycle. Every one of the forty lots offered found a buyer, and three results pulled focus from the trophy-headline Warhol pre-sale narrative: a Lee Bontecou pastel-on-canvas set a new auction record for the artist’s two-dimensional work, a Pat Passlof composition broke through a record set only three months earlier at Sotheby’s, and an early Anna Weyant painting cleared its high estimate by 158 percent.
For underwriters tracking the comp set for postwar and contemporary collateral, the data point that matters is not the Warhol — it’s the depth of the bidding book on works by women artists whose secondary-market floors had been stuck for two cycles.
The headline numbers
Phillips reported $115,232,400 in total sales against a pre-sale low estimate of $84.2 million, with all forty lots sold after two pre-sale withdrawals (a Richard Prince and an Albert Oehlen). The result represents a 90.7 percent premium over the 2025 spring contemporary equivalent and re-establishes Phillips as a credible third leg of New York’s marquee-week tape alongside Christie’s and Sotheby’s. Stacked against Christie’s $1.1 billion two-sale night on May 18 and Sotheby’s $303.9 million Modern Evening on May 19, the May fortnight closed at a combined $1.85 billion across the three houses.
Lee Bontecou’s $4.2 million record
The most consequential price discovery of the evening was Bontecou’s untitled pastel on canvas (1985–2001), which sold for $3.3 million hammer / $4.2 million with fees and set a new auction record for any two-dimensional work by the artist. Bontecou’s market has historically been concentrated in her welded-canvas reliefs from the 1960s; secondary-market data has lagged her institutional reappraisal for nearly a decade. The May 19 result moves her two-dimensional ceiling from the high six figures into seven-figure territory and resets the floor for the roughly 90 known late-period works on canvas.
Pat Passlof and the second-generation Abstract Expressionists
Passlof’s Fortune (1960) — a large-scale composition from her Tenth Street studio period — hammered $450,000 / $580,500 with fees, surpassing the record she set at Sotheby’s in February of this year. That sequence — two records in three months — is the cleaner signal here than the absolute price. Second-generation Abstract Expressionists trade in a market that historically corrects in step with the first-generation cohort, and back-to-back records confirm that the postwar comp set is widening downward to artists whose work was effectively non-collateralizable in the 2018–2022 cycle.
Anna Weyant clears $980,000
Weyant’s early painting of a flaxen-haired woman lying face-down on a dinner table sold to a phone bidder for $760,000 hammer / $980,400 with fees, against an estimate of $380,000–$500,000. Weyant’s secondary-market performance had been viewed with caution after the 2023 contraction in figurative-painting prices; the May 19 result clears the high estimate by 158 percent and confirms that her market has stabilized above $1 million for major early works. For lenders, the read is that one auction cycle is now sufficient to re-establish a price floor for the strongest figurative-painting names — a compression of the historical 18-month re-pricing lag.
What the white-glove result confirms
A 40-of-40 sell-through is, mathematically, a 100 percent sold rate — what the trade calls a white-glove sale. Phillips’ last white-glove evening was in November 2022. The 2026 spring marquee week, taken in aggregate, produced one $1.1 billion night, a $303.9 million doubleheader follow-up, and now a sold-out Phillips. The 2025 spring cycle, by comparison, returned $1.1 billion across three houses combined. The 2026 fortnight delivered $1.85 billion. That is not a recovery narrative — it is a step-change in collector liquidity and confirmation that the trophy-and-tier-2 bid is back in the room.
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Phillips’ sold-out evening rounds out a marquee fortnight that included Sotheby’s $303.9 million Modern Evening anchored by Matisse’s La Chaise lorraine and Christie’s $1.1 billion Newhouse and 20th Century doubleheader on May 18 — together establishing the new postwar comp table.
