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.
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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.
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