ABOVE: detail from Cremaster 1: Goodyear (1995), a silver gelatin print of a frame from Barney’s epic bizarro-opera The Cremaster Cycle. The print was one lot in a headline-worthy sale by Phillips, de Pury & Company, which is quickly becoming a premiere auction house. Barney’s print sold for $156,000.

It was the $1.5 million sale of Jean Michel Basquiat’s Catharsis (1983) that garnered headlines for the reincarnated and apparently stylish auction house Phillips, de Pury & Company, but the real story here may be the trendiness the auctioneer has cultivated with New York buyers, which the New York Times hinted at in its story on the sale.

Phillips, de Pury & Co. is the product of several mergers and acquisitions of European and American firms, and was briefly owned by luxury goods mega-retailer LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton before being sold to Simon de Pury in chunks, with the whole deal being finished in 2004. The Chelsea salesroom opened in 2003, and has apparently become a destination for status-conscious collectors to whom Christie’s and Sotheby’s look rather dowdy.

The sale last Thursday didn’t meet its high estimate, but some pieces shot well beyond their estimated values. Basquiat’s was one, Richard Prince’s A Nurse Involved was another, going for $1 million, more than three times its $300K estimate; Ron Mueck’s important first sculpture, Pinocchio, settled at just above its minimum estimate, but still set a record for any sculpture by the artist. P, de P & Co. are going places—but it’ll be interesting to see if it’s up or down.

LINK: The New York Times > At $1.5 Million, Classic by Basquiat Leads Auction