Top: Mario Testino, Kate Moss, and Simon de Pury at the opening of the exhibit Mario Testino Kate Who?, at Phillips de Pury & Company in London. Below: de Pury, DJ’ing at the 10th-anniversary party for RxArt.
Not surprisingly, de Pury has created a rambunctious pop mood at Phillips, the underdog auction house regularly characterized as “struggling” by the art press, as its manpower, sales, and reach are considerably smaller than those of behemoths Sotheby’s and Christie’s. But Phillips is also seen as a bold—some say flashy—innovator, especially since the Russian luxury-retail giant Mercury Group bought the controlling stake in the company three years ago. Mercury is run by Leonid Strunin and his partner, CEO Leonid Friedland, whom Suzy Menkes, the fashion critic for the International Herald Tribune, once dubbed “one of the most powerful men in fashion.” (The group owns the TSUM department store in Moscow, the Barvikha Luxury Village in a Moscow suburb, and sells brands ranging from Gucci to Maserati—all of which has helped Phillips establish a firm foothold in the Russian contemporary art market.) Spurred by the infusion of new cash, Phillips has introduced cocktails and club music into its auction previews, marketed design to contemporary art collectors, and held themed auctions like BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) as a way to capitalize on emerging markets.
The house has also drawn the ire of a number of gallery owners for bringing works by young artists to the auction block. Last fall, 27-year-old painter Jacob Kassay made headlines after Phillips sold one of his canvases, first completed and shown in 2009, for $86,500, more than 10 times its high estimate. Fierce bidding for another Kassay painting during Phillips’s evening sale this past May, just six months later, brought a price of $290,500. (His work sells for $20,000 to $40,000 on the primary market, though there’s a waiting list; at auction, if they’re willing to pay top dollar, bidders can jump the line.) Tapping artists for the secondary market early in their careers (what de Pury called “buying tomorrow’s blue-chip artists today”) has made him unpopular with several dealers, who see the practice as potentially damaging to the long-term development of talent. De Pury, however—while acknowledging the gallery’s role in nurturing artists and placing their work in the right hands—insisted that “those galleries that try to control it…well, that’s ultimately completely counterproductive, because you also need works of an artist to come regularly onto the market for the confidence level to develop. A work’s standing in the auction market is the most concrete marker of its value.”
