Phillips Reframing Beauty Auction Results

After months without any photography auctions, Phillips came back with two on the same day. Reframing Beauty: A Private Seattle Collection saw 65 lots for sale from artists such as Robert Adams, Stephen Shore, Lee Friedlander, Nan Golden and Diane Arbus. Auctions from private collections usually throw up some affordable lots for collectors and this auction was no exception with a Diane Arbus print selling for just $6,300.

The most expensive lot was Peter Hujar’s David Wojnarowicz Reclining (II) which was expected to fetch $40,000-$60,000 but gained a hammer price of $157,500, more than doubling its top estimate. In second place was another outperforming print, this time from Robert Frank, whose Longmont, Colorado sold for $81,900 after an initial estimate of $50,000-$70,000. Frank rounded out the top three with another one of his works, this time the polyptych Southwest from the South Jetty, Clatsop County, Oregon, which sold for $63,000 after an original estimate of $50,000-$70,000.

As the auction took place on the same day as Phillips’ Photographs auction, the sales total of Reframing Beauty was lumped in with the Photographs total, as is often the practice for Phillips. You can read all about the Photographs auction in the next post, alternatively you can browse all the lots from the Reframing Beauty auction at Phillips’ webpage here.

image by Olena Sergienko