The art market isn’t broken, exactly, but in the eyes of art market veterans Ed Dolman, Alex Dolman, Brett Gorvy, Philip Hoffman, and Patti Wong, it doesn’t function the way it used to. The group aims to change that with a new collaborative consultancy, New Perspectives Art Partners (NPAP), announced Thursday.

The consultancy won’t operate like a normal firm: each partner is keeping their day job, and they’ll only assemble when there’s a high-level, specialized problem that needs solving. Think of it like the Avengers, but for the art world.

“We’re not just another advisory,” Gorvy told ARTnews over the phone earlier this week. “This is more like a McKinsey model—a team that comes together to dissect a problem and solve it.”

NPAP isn’t looking to simply broker sales. Instead, it will advise collectors, fiduciaries, and family offices on how to manage, grow, or disperse significant collections with global context and institutional muscle. A major selling point is the group’s deep experience across different segments of the market—from auction houses and top galleries to institutions and high-end advisory—and a geographical footprint that spans Hong Kong to Doha.

Gorvy and Dolman both acknowledged that the current art market is at an inflection point. “We’re not starting this in a boom,” Gorvy said. “We’re starting this in a market that’s becoming complex.”

Dolman pointed to the proliferation of third-party guarantees, declining resale premiums, and regional fragmentation as evidence of a “paradigm shift” in the auction market, with the biggest houses becoming “victims of their own success.”

“What used to be a straightforward business has gotten massively complicated,” Dolman said. “That auction model, once full of surprise and upside, now feels rigid—designed more to manage risk than to serve buyers.”

Gorvy suggested that the market’s fragmentation and increasing complexity have created an opening.

“The tried-and-tested platforms are all showing signs of failure—or at least exhaustion,” Gorvy said. “But that chaos creates opportunity. If you can help clients navigate it, you can add real value.”

NPAP, the partners say, draws strength not just from its flexible structure but from the chemistry behind it. Dolman and Hoffman have known each other since the early 1990s. Gorvy worked closely with Dolman in the early 2000s. And although Patti Wong was a longtime competitor—she led Sotheby’s Asia while Gorvy served as Christie’s chairman and international head of postwar and contemporary art—Gorvy always admired her from afar.

“I was jealous of her power in the marketplace,” he said.

Both Gorvy and Dolman stressed that discretion is baked into the consultancy’s model. There’s no brand-building exercise, no junior staff scrambling for consignment quotas.

“Relevancy is what we keep coming back to,” Gorvy said. “What’s relevant to collectors right now? What’s relevant to institutions? To fiduciaries?”

Phillips has named Martin Wilson as the house’s new chief executive officer amid another leadership shuffle, succeeding Ed Dolman, who held the dual position of CEO and executive chairman over the last year, and is now departing from the house after ten years. Wilson previously served as Phillips’ chief legal officer.

The move coincides with the departure of Amanda Lo Iacono, the company’s deputy CEO, a position she held for only a year. Lo Iacono moved in the position just last year when Stephen Brooks, Phillip’s former CEO and an ex-Christie’s executive, left the position abruptly after just over two years with the auction house.

Lo Iacono, who was with the auction house for a total of eight years, will leave the position at the end of December 2024, to pursue outside opportunities.

Dolman will remain Executive Chairman through May 2025 before moving into a consultancy role. A veteran executive who led Phillips through a period of growth beginning in 2014, he was reinstated to combine his current role with the CEO position after Brooks left.

According to a statement, Wilson, who was also once a Christie’s executive, has been involved in facilitating major sales at the house and has ties to the collectors behind them.

The shift comes at a time when Phillips, the smallest of the three major auction houses, faces a challenging economic climate alongside Sotheby’s and Christie’s. There was an estimated 25 percent drop in auction sales between 2023 and 2024. Sotheby’s laid off over 100 employees last week as the house carried out an internal restructuring.

Dolman, who previously led Christie’s and Qatar Museums, was credited with raising Phillips’ global profile, particularly in Asia, and honing a focus on sales by emerging contemporary artists. (Phillips has not yet released its annual figures from 2024.)

“After a decade at Phillips, it is time for me to turn to new pursuits and to explore new ways of engaging in the world of art. In these ten years, I had the privilege of working with a world-class team to grow Phillips’ impact and reach with extraordinary record-breaking sales in new locations worldwide,” Dolman said in a statement.

After having just announced plans to form an art advisory service, the London-based auction house Phillips has appointed Stephen Brooks as its new CEO. Brooks, who was most recently deputy chief executive officer at Christie’s where he ran the houses’s financial operations, will take over for Ed Dolman, the current CEO of Phillips. Dolman, who has been in the position since 2014, will transition into a new role as executive chairman.

Brooks, who will look to expand the house’s reach in Asia and bolster its top-grossing contemporary art and luxury categories, is taking the helm at Phillips after a volatile period for the auction industry. The pandemic’s economic toll has seen its total 2020 sales of $760.4 million fall 16 percent from the previous year’s $908 million.

“After moments of trauma, history often sees an explosion of cultural and economic activity,” Brooks said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news. “We’ve got a huge opportunity for growth here.”

In his new role as CEO, Brooks will oversee financials and daily operations across Phillips’ four global salesrooms in the U.S., Europe and the U.K., and Asia, managing an international staff that produces some 70 sales annually. When Dolman took over in 2014, Phillips held 38 sales annually.

“Stephen is known for his successful record of innovation in the business and this aligns with Phillips’ own ethos and spirit. Together I am certain we will make a great team,” Cheyanne Westhphal, Phillips global chairman, said in a statement.

In August, Brooks left his position at Christie’s after five years as deputy chief executive officer, where he maintained broad oversight of business operations. During his tenure at Christie’s, Brooks was tasked with leading strategic internal programs across the company that included legal, financial, marketing, and e-commerce initiatives. Brooks was also a key negotiator in major deals—including the $835 million sale of David and Peggy Rockefeller’s esteemed art collection.

Brooks announced his exit from Christie’s last June, leaving the company at a crucial moment shortly after the rescheduled marquee sales later that month, following several months of changes in the wake of the global coronavirus pandemic.

He had been with Christie’s since the 2009 recession, serving previously as chief financial officer and chief operating officer. In his decade-plus-long tenure, he helped facilitate the auction house’s recovery. Before joining Christie’s, Brooks was chief financial officer of Schroders, a British asset management firm, and global chief financial officer at London investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein.

Dolman, who was also previously an executive at Christie’s, is known for having expanded Phillips international reach in Hong Kong and for doubling sales volume over a seven year period. As executive chairman, he will oversee Phillips’s holding company, aiming to secure top consignments and to forge new ties with established collectors in Asia.

Hartley Waltman has been named general counsel of the Americas for Phillips auction house. Waltman joins Phillips in July after 20 years at Christie’s, most recently as senior vice president and senior counsel. In his new role, Waltman will be tasked with overseeing legal functions in North America from Phillips’s New York office, reporting to Martin Wilson, Phillips’s chief legal counsel.

In a release, Edward Dolman, Phillips’s CEO, said Hartman “brings with him considerable expertise, sharp judgment, and a long track record of successfully negotiating high value art transactions and resolving complex disputes.”

This evening, following record results in its day sales, Phillips in New York hosted its 20th-century and contemporary art evening auction, bringing in $99.9 million across 45 lots, a drop from the $131.6 million it earned at the same sale last year from 36 lots.

Only one of the 45 works failed to sell, an untitled Christopher Wool abstraction from 1998 that had carried an estimate of $2 million to $3 million. That performance was helped by a bounty of guarantees. Of the 45 works, 29 had guarantees (12 from third parties and 17 from the house), meaning that they were certain to sell.

Three artist records were set, for Tomoo Gokita ($1.08 million), Dana Schutz ($980,000, though that was eclipsed just hours later at Sotheby’s), and Nicolas Party ($608,000).

The top lot of the evening was Willem de Kooning’s dynamic Untitled XVI (1976). Estimated at $8 million to $12 million, it brought in $10.3 million, selling to New York gallery owner Christina di Donna.

Just behind the de Kooning was Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Self Portrait (1983), which went for $9.5 million against a $9 million-to-$12 million estimate. The piece, which Basquiat painted across two dilapidated door frames, was previously owned by musician and music mogul Matt Dike, a close friend of artist who had acquired the work from him directly.

On the heels of the news that KAWS will have a survey at the Brooklyn Museum in 2021, and following the jaw-dropping $14.7 million price achieved for one of his works about a month ago in Hong Kong, his market power showed no signs of letting up. His piece The Walk Home (2012), which features SpongeBob SquarePants, blasted through its $600,000-to-$800,000 estimate, finishing at an astonishing $5.96 million. Crowd members either gasped or sighed when the gavel hit.

Just before the big KAWS sale, another growing auction force made a new record. Nicholas Party’s richly colored Landscape (2015) went for more than five times its $100,000-to-$150,000 estimate, bringing in a total of $608,000.

Asked about the KAWS after the action, Ed Dolman, CEO of Phillips, told ARTnews, “We knew before the sale that it was going to do pretty well because we had so much interest. But I don’t think anyone was expecting it to make that much of a splash.”

Dolman added, “When you think about how much money that is and you put it into context with all the other great art you can buy, it’s pretty spectacular.”

Another piece by KAWS, Untitled (MBFU9), 2015, this one featuring Snoopy, obliterated its $300,000-to-$500,000 estimate, raking in $1.34 million.

Estimated at $8 million to $12 million, Mark Bradford’s sweeping, large-scale collage piece Helter Skelter II (2007) was positioned to possibly shatter the artist’s $12 million record, but instead finished at $8.48 million on a single bid, presumably going to its third-party guarantor. Bradford’s record remains with its sister piece, Helter Skelter I (2007), which is currently in the collection of the Broad Museum in Los Angeles. Collector Eli Broad picked it up at Phillips in London last year.

Several pieces from the sale came from the collection of Miles and Shirley Fiterman, which was heavy on Pop icons like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, as well as 20th-century masters like Alexander Calder, Robert Motherwell, and Joan Miró. One highlight from their collection was Lichtenstein’s Horse and Rider (1976) sold for $5.9 million against an estimate of $6 million to $8 million.

Another Lichtenstein in tonight’s sale, Modern Painting (1967), sold to Austrian gallerist Thaddaeus Ropac for $2.9 million. 

Alexander Calder’s large, mobile Black Gamma (1966),  last seen in public in 1974, when it was on view at Paris’s Galerie Maeght, sold for $5.48 million against an estimate of $5 million to $7 million.

An untitled Cy Twombly chalkboard piece from 1970, estimated at $4 million to $6 million, sold for $4.7 million. It had previously gone for $5 million at Sotheby’s New York in 2015 at its May contemporary art evening sale.

No Title (1967) by Eva Hesse sold for $3.9 million, above its estimate of $2.5 million to $3.5 million, with art dealer Neal Meltzer as the unlucky underbidder.

Tomoo Gokita’s Be Just Like Family (2015) set his auction record at $1.08 million, well over his 2018 record of $807,000, and Dana Schutz’s Signing (2009) took her auction record to $980,000, besting a $795,000 mark set last year.

“We’ve had two really good days of sales, which is really gratifying,” Dolman said. “It points to the strength of the market, but also you can see this extraordinary shift in taste going on. The works by new younger artists are very strong in the market right now.”

Judd Tully contributed reporting.

Phillips’s worldwide head of design and deputy chairman in Europe, Alexander Payne, has stepped down after working with the auction house for 20 years.

In a statement, Payne said, “I am immensely grateful for the loyalty and friendship of my wonderful colleagues, and for their dedication to, and belief in, the Design team. I will look back on my time at Phillips with much gratitude, and enormous pride in what my team has achieved.”

Payne himself set up the design department at Phillips. He was promoted to deputy chairman in Europe in 2016.

Ed Dolman, Phillips’ CEO, added, “Alexander has created a department that is world-renowned. He remains an internationally leading source of knowledge and expertise. Alexander will be remembered at Phillips for his passion and dedication, which have created some of the most significant auction results in recent history.”

Next year, Phillips auction house is slated to leave its current location at Park Avenue and East 57th Street for a new building just down the street in Midtown Manhattan. The move—to a storied building at 432 Park Ave.—will keep the auction house within walking distance of Upper East Side galleries as well as the Park Avenue Armory, the Met Breuer, and other uptown art destinations.

Phillips CEO Edward Dolman said in a release, “We have experienced exponential growth in recent years, and this move marks a significant milestone for our company, our employees, and our clients, who will all benefit from the many opportunities presented by this expansion.”

The move into 55,000 square feet of space will be facilitated through Macklowe Properties, and some of that new footprint will be in the Park Avenue Cube, a 5,000-square-foot structure on the corner of 56th Street and Park designed by Rafael Viñoly and Harry Macklowe. “The new location offers a state-of the-art exhibition space to display contemporary art, design, watches, and jewelry, and matches the unrivaled setting we offer collectors in our London gallery in Berkeley Square in Mayfair,” Dolman said. Aside from the exhibition space, the new site will include executive office space with an entrance on 40 East 57th Street. 

Harry Macklowe, chairman of Macklowe Properties—and himself the source of news last week when a judge ordered him and his wife, as part of a divorce, to sell their $700 million art collection—said of the expansion, “This move by Phillips has fulfilled my vision to house the company in an appropriate home to allow it to more effectively serve the public and continue to create a strong voice in the art world. The auction house presents significant and rarified objects here and internationally, and we are pleased and recognize Phillips as a complementary neighbor to our world-famous building.”

In May 2015, during a high-profile auction at the peak of the contemporary art market’s stratospheric rise, the bidding on Picasso’s Les femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’) at Christie’s New York salesroom had slowed to a stop. Collectors including the casino magnate Steve Wynn had called in with bids, but after the work, painted in 1955, passed its $140 million estimate, the field of potential buyers had dwindled down to just two, each on the phone with one of Christie’s head reps: specialist Loic Gouzer and, as chairman and global head of the postwar and contemporary department, Brett Gorvy. With the room holding its collective breath, Gorvy offered a bid of $159 million, only to be quickly one-upped by Gouzer. The higher bid of $159.5 million seemed to be the knockout blow—the gavel was up, ready to thwock on the wood.

Perched on the far edge of the rostrum, Gorvy, still on the phone, suddenly jerked up his hand to bid again. A gasp went through the salesroom before a rising silence signaled a milestone in the making: Gorvy, two decades into his career at Christie’s, had reached the art world’s pinnacle with a winning bid, on behalf of a client, for $160 million—anointing the Picasso, priced at $179.4 million with the buyer’s premium, the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction.

Then, a little more than one year later, Gorvy walked away from the game.

“To have that kind of adrenaline rush, to be in the auction room and everyone’s bidding up these works of art—it’s a fantastic experience,” Gorvy told me later, thinking back from a different vantage in March 2017. “You can have it on the outside, but it’s not the same.”

“But I did my 23 years,” he added. “I have the flagellation marks to prove it.”

Gorvy was sitting in his office on the fourth floor of the landmarked Madison Avenue building that now houses Lévy Gorvy, the gallery he started with fellow ex-Christie’s fixture Dominique Lévy after shocking the art world by leaving the auction house this past December. He seemed relaxed. Leading me upstairs past handlers installing the Seung-taek Lee exhibition set to open that night, he tossed out the fact that all but one of the pieces were already sold. He was sipping a Perrier and dressed with a discerning but easy air.

“The big difference between Brett then and now,” Sara Friedlander, head of Christie’s postwar and contemporary department in New York, told me, “is ‘Brett before’ was wearing a tie and ‘Brett now’ is wearing a sweater.”

Gorvy left at a time of unease for Christie’s. Signs of distress in the market had been on the rise and, a week following the shake-up at the top of the ranks, Christie’s owner François Pinault announced a CEO swap, with Patricia Barbizet, a veteran executive of Pinault’s holding company Groupe Artémis, out in favor of Guillaume Cerutti, formerly the president of Christie’s Europe, Middle East, Russia, and India operations. A month into the job, Cerutti made a statement acknowledging that sales in 2016 had contracted 22 percent from the previous year, to a total gross of $4.1 billion. (Sales at Sotheby’s, the firm’s chief competitor, were similarly down, a sign of the market’s general trajectory; in March 2017, UBS Group AG and Art Basel released a report that indicates global auction sales declined 26 percent, to $22.1 billion, in 2016.) In line with that trend, Christie’s announced plans to take decisive action: closing its South Kensington salesroom, a hub for auctions of decorative art and furniture since it opened in 1975; ceasing regular sales in Amsterdam; and laying off up to 250 staffers. A few months later, Christie’s announced that it was calling off the annual June auction of postwar and contemporary art at its flagship King Street salesroom.

“The market has changed over the last decade,” Cerutti said in an interview this past March. “Some fields, like the decorative arts, have seen a decline, and we have to take into account that tastes have changed. There’s a shift toward more modern and contemporary, and we have to reflect and adapt. I thought it was better to do that very quickly and focus on the future—very quickly.”

The rise of contemporary art as the art market’s primary bellwether—and the sky-high prices it has achieved—has been the story of the past two decades. In May 2002, Christie’s seized upon the advent of a new crop of collectors and held its first postwar and contemporary evening auction in five years in New York. The result was a $46.9 million haul that bested Sotheby’s contemporary sale by $5 million. By 2006, a surging market aided Christie’s era-defining dominance, with sales that autumn nearly doubling those of Sotheby’s, and significant successes in years to come. In the spring of 2007, Christie’s notched $384 million—the highest-grossing auction in history at the time—compared to Sotheby’s $315.9 million. During that time, Christie’s is understood to have been well-capitalized, and the contemporary department was helmed by a hard-charging duo: Gorvy and his co-department head Amy Cappellazzo.

The trend continued through downtimes during the recession and then again on the upswing: by the market’s peak, in May 2015—even after Cappellazzo’s departure to start an art advisory firm—Christie’s pulled in $1.7 billion in five days of sales, while Sotheby’s managed $890 million.

But then Sotheby’s started catching up. Since that time, Christie’s has come up against increased competition from its rival—for whom Cappellazzo now works—which came close to matching Christie’s in the all-important evening sale face-off last November. Sotheby’s was off by just $410,000, a scant number in a billion-dollar auction week. And a robust day sale soon after managed to give Sotheby’s the overall edge. During the London auctions in March, the Sotheby’s contemporary evening sale topped the one at Christie’s by $26 million, a figure all the more formidable for a sale with two fewer lots.

All the roiling activity set up a showdown for this year’s New York contemporary sales in May, arguably the most important live auction bazaar of the year. In one corner: a resurgent operation at Sotheby’s; in the other: a rebooted Christie’s team made up of relatively young auction-world personalities angling to capture big lots during a time when many potential consignors have clammed up in a down market—and just months after their imposing leader’s departure.

“One of my colleagues at Christie’s has been saying, ‘You don’t want the May sales to be strong—you want to look good!’ ” Gorvy told me. “But it’s quite the opposite. You build your legacy, [and] the last thing you want is to leave and find that everything falls apart.”

The annual June sales in London tend to be indicators of the market’s status after the annual Art Basel fair in Switzerland, before the doldrums of late summer, and in June 2016 the signs were none too promising. Collectors seemed hesitant to put works on the auction block in an uncertain market. Then, over the summer, word began to spread of a major estate that was being shopped around during what were exceedingly trying times—catnip for consignment-deprived specialists. It was the collection of Steven and Anne Ames—assembled with the bounties of high-finance and lineage in the Annenberg family—and within it was a prime pair of abstract paintings by Gerhard Richter, both of which could be $20 million lots.

After appeals from both houses, the collection went to Sotheby’s. It was, according to sources, the first big estate Christie’s had lost in years, apart from that of the former Sotheby’s chairman, Alfred Taubman. But by putting up a $100 million guarantee—a show of muscle-flexing that came with considerable risk—Sotheby’s gained an edge in a weak sales season.

“This outstanding collection is exactly what the market is currently looking for,” Grégoire Billault, head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s, told me at the time, “and as such we are very comfortable with the level of our guarantee.” The guarantee paid off a few months later, when “The Triumph of Painting: The Steven & Anne Ames Collection” brought in $131.3 million.

Given the state of the market during the summer of 2016, Sotheby’s beating Christie’s to such a collection marked a shift of balance. The warring houses had for years intensified their contentious duopoly—with another auction house, Phillips, traditionally a distant third-place finisher—and both spent increasing sums to beat their respective archrival on consignments. Eventually, the playground bullying pushed the realm of prices past what buyers were willing to pay. “From the outside, the auction houses were still being very aggressive with clients, and there were certain prices that were not real,” said Pilar Ordovas, a dealer with galleries in London and New York who worked at Christie’s from 1996 until 2009, most of that time as international director and deputy chairman in contemporary. “They were losing money and creating prices that were not reflective of reality.”

The downturn had started to have visible effects just months after Gorvy’s bidder paid the $179.4 million for Picasso’s Les femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’), when Christie’s staged a themed auction under Gouzer’s direction in New York in November 2015. The second sale, titled “The Artist’s Muse,” couldn’t match the dazzle of the previous masterpiece-loaded event, itself also a themed sale with the title “Looking Forward to the Past.” The November auction barely squeaked past its low estimate, collecting $491.4 million, with nearly a third of the lots failing to find buyers. The casualties included Willem de Kooning’s Woman (circa 1952–53)—a work whose pre-promised guarantee forced Christie’s to buy the painting valued between $14 million and $18 million—and Lucian Freud’s Naked Portrait on a Red Sofa (1989–91).

“The ability to bring to market top-value pieces—that type of buying wasn’t happening as much anymore,” Gorvy said. “We came out of the ‘Muse’ sale understanding that, while it was feasible with the May sale, by the time we got to the end of the year, it was difficult getting material. It was difficult getting it to the right price, and the buying pool was less. We needed time for it to grow back.”

One of the paintings in “The Artist’s Muse” sale was Roy Lichtenstein’s Nurse (1964), which had been consigned by Boston collector Barbara Lee, with a low estimate of $80 million. She had purchased the work over the phone at a Sotheby’s sale in May 1995 during a down period for contemporary art, at a price of $1.7 million. (The seller then was Peter Brant, chairman of the parent company of ARTnews.) Before the sale, Christie’s announced that Nurse had been guaranteed by a third-party backer, contrary to what was printed in the catalogue.

When Christie’s Global President Jussi Pylkkänen started the bidding, not a single hand in the room went up. There was a sole bidder on the phone with Laura Paulson, chairman and international director of the postwar and contemporary department for the Americas. After a few minutes of waiting in vain for a second bidder, the work went to that unknown voice on the phone for $95.4 million, well over the high estimate, setting a worldwide auction record for Lichtenstein. In the decades between its appearances at auction, the value of Nurse had increased by more than 5,500 percent.

But who actually bought it? After the sale, Gorvy posted to Instagram a photo of himself and collector Kemal Has Cingillioglu, who consigned Andy Warhol’s Four Marilyns (1962), the lot that led the postwar and contemporary evening sale the night after “The Artist’s Muse.”

“Congratulations to the new buyer of Roy Lichtenstein’s Nurse,” Gorvy wrote on Instagram, on which he has more than 68,000 followers. “I look forward to visiting her often.”

Seeing the post, some observers assumed Cingillioglu was the buyer, but Gorvy firmly denied that claim in a follow-up Instagram post. According to multiple sources—including former Christie’s employees and dealers who work closely with the auction house—the buyer on the other end of the phone was, in fact, Christie’s owner François Pinault, who had placed an irrevocable bid on the lot as a third-party guarantor, mitigating the risk of the in-house guarantee. And thus, when the lot failed to find a buyer, Pinault purchased the work in a sequence of events that caused those with knowledge of the transaction to surmise that it was an effort to help Christie’s save face on a high-profile lot for which no other bidders had stepped up.

“They got stuck with a $95 million painting on the books,” said a source familiar with the transaction. “They thought they would find a third party later.”

When I asked whether Pinault had purchased Nurse, Gorvy said, “Not that I’m aware of.” A Christie’s spokeswoman, asked the same, said, “Per policy, Christie’s does not comment on buyers or financial arrangements.” Attempts to solicit comment from Pinault through other means proved unsuccessful.

After the sales in November 2015, Christie’s, along with the other houses, tried to navigate a rocky market. Then deputy chairman Loic Gouzer—who had become known for putting together the curated sales—trolled market speculators in May 2016 with “Bound to Fail,” a disappointment-themed auction. After the sale, Gouzer told me he had wanted to comment on the state of the market by purposefully picking work by artists who don’t sell well at auction. “We had artists who weren’t market darlings,” he said. “When something was too easy, or a definite winner, we said, ‘No, no, no.’ ”

The sale proved a surprise success, with all but one of 39 lots sold—and only eleven guaranteed by a third party—for a net total of $78.1 million, well over a low estimate of $59.4 million. But it was not enough to stave off a shake-up in the months to come. Marc Porter, Christie’s chairman of the Americas, resigned and announced he would take a job at Sotheby’s. Robert Manley, a deputy chairman in the postwar department, left for Phillips, and Jonathan Laib, a specialist, left for David Zwirner gallery. In November, Sara Friedlander, a young and well-liked former head of the evening sale known for winning performances as an auctioneer at charity galas, was named head of the department. Christie’s did make a major hire, in June 2016, poaching Alex Rotter from Sotheby’s and making him chairman of the department—but, as per the noncompetition agreements that both houses have their employees sign, he could not start until March of this year.

The competing houses also saw turnover. Uncertainty at Sotheby’s under the taboo-busting outsider stewardship of president and CEO Tad Smith led to voluntary layoffs and high-profile departures. Phillips—making a play for more prominence—went on a hiring spree.

“Some of the old ties of loyalty to management teams have been broken in many respects, and that has resulted in this huge turnover in staff,” said Ed Dolman, chairman and CEO of Phillips and, before a three-year stint at Qatar Museums Authority, formerly CEO, and then chairman, at Christie’s during a 27-year tenure. “Not long ago, it was rare for someone to leave one of the houses and go to the other, and now it’s become de rigueur. Everybody’s moving around. It’s quite difficult for me to remember where an old colleague of mine is now working, at Sotheby’s or Christie’s.”

All the while, Gorvy, the main face of Christie’s postwar and contemporary department and its amiable ambassador, had been mulling a move. For the previous five years, he had maintained a standing offer from Dominique Lévy to join her gallery as a partner. The deal-making began when she first went off on her own after splitting with her former partner, Robert Mnuchin. Gorvy had known Lévy for years: she worked as the head of private sales at Christie’s from 1999 to 2003, and, from 2010 to 2011, Gorvy’s wife, Amy Gold, worked as a senior director at L & M Arts, Lévy’s gallery with Mnuchin.

In the summer of 2016, Gorvy had a five-year contract up for renegotiation, but he had Christie’s table it until after the fall sales. During a visit with Lévy in Italy, they made a handshake deal. “It was about building something together,” Gorvy told me later, recalling the episode from his new position on the outside. “I didn’t want to leave at a time when the market was in a downward spin.”

After the November sales, on Thanksgiving Day, Gorvy told Christie’s he was leaving. The industry went apoplectic.

“The biggest issue is, when you have someone who has been there for a long time,” said Ordovas, who worked with Gorvy for more than a decade at Christie’s, “you’re losing a lot of history and a lot of connections.”

After a year of down sales, Patricia Barbizet, who had served as the first-ever female CEO of Christie’s since her appointment in 2014, was out. She selected her own successor and was named vice chair of Christie’s board—and she continues to work for Pinault as CEO of Artémis—but in interviews after her departure was announced in December 2016, former and current Christie’s employees characterized her to me as removed and hard to communicate with. (Unlike the publicly held Sotheby’s, which must divulge information to shareholders, Christie’s is privately held and thus has no such obligation—making for a more secretive culture in which sources often request anonymity for fear of retribution.)

Other sources said her slow nature and indecisive manner lost business for the company, and that clients would simply move on if she took too long to figure out what to do. Even Gorvy acknowledged that those who worked directly with Barbizet would comment on the lack of decision making and go their own way.

To many on the outside, however, the speed of the revolving door suggested a lack of focus at the house. “Quite unusual, I would say,” was Dolman’s response to the fact that three CEOs have now succeeded him since he left Christie’s in 2011.

But Cerutti, Barbizet’s replacement, strikes most of the sources I spoke with as right for the job. He’s a people person, by all accounts. Of the nearly dozen current and former Christie’s staffers I talked to, almost all of them described him as “hands-on.” Many mentioned that he would fly from Christie’s global headquarters in London to New York at the drop of a hat to help secure a deal.

“He wants to be the front line, going back to the marching orders,” Rotter said of his new boss. “He’s not the colonel who will sit in his tent while he lets his other people die—he’ll be on the front line.”

An auction-house CEO is not typically involved in the workaday aspects of cherry picking artworks from collections and shoehorning them into other collections. During her reign, Barbizet always went through Gorvy and Pylkkänen, and Steven P. Murphy, her predecessor, was more focused on expanding into Asian markets than on inserting himself on the granular level.

Then there are others like Sotheby’s CEO Tad Smith, who, upon being appointed, had no background in the art world and, sources say, does not involve himself directly in consignments or with specialists much at all.

For Cerutti, however, it would seem to be part of the job. Some of the consignments in the May 2017 sale were secured because Cerutti parachuted in to save the day in pitch meetings, impressing potential consignors with the presence of the boss in the room.

“I really like it,” Cerutti told me on the phone from his office in London. “This is about art and clients. My conception of my role is: I have to dedicate part of my time, most of my time, working with the core of our team and, of course, deal with clients myself.”

When he assumed his new position at the beginning of this year, he hit the ground running. A few weeks into the job, he announced the cutbacks, including the layoffs and the cancellation of sales, as well as the closing of Christie’s South Kensington salesroom. The layoffs would eliminate 12 percent of the global Christie’s workforce—they constitute the most widespread cutbacks for Christie’s since the art market collapsed in 2009, in the wake of a general financial meltdown.

Among the primary challenges for any auction house of late has been securing lots, and, as 2017 began, it was time for Christie’s to play tug-of-war with Sotheby’s and Phillips over consignments for the May sales. Members of Christie’s contemporary department in New York, in tandem with their colleagues in London, work together to get these consignments from collectors with varying levels of desire to sell. Laura Paulson, the team’s ranking member, has brought in several key estates over the years, including those of Victor and Sally Ganz in 1997, novelist Michael Crichton in 2010, and David Pincus in 2012. Barrett White and Andrew Massad work on new clients, and Koji Inoue focuses on getting Japanese collectors to sell and buy work in New York. Sara Friedlander, as head of the contemporary evening sale in New York, also ropes in collectors and gets them to agree to offer up works to be sold in the salesroom.

Then there is Loic Gouzer, who joined in 2011 and has become known for aggressively going after work even if a collector has no intention to sell. He has also been known to be notoriously hard to find. Gouzer’s Instagram bio reads “Christie’s Auction House (sometimes),” and from the looks of pictures in his feed, he has always appeared as likely to be in Rwanda as in Rockefeller Center.

“He turns up to work when he wants to work,” Gorvy told me, “and spends half his life basically surfing.”

For six months at the end of 2016, Gouzer had been sidelined by a knee injury incurred while playing soccer. Related surgeries and a heavily medicated recuperation period caused him to miss the fall 2016 sales in New York—and Gorvy’s departure. “When Brett announced he was leaving,” Gouzer told me, “I was high as a kite on 30 mg of oxycodone. You could tell me the world had come to an end, you could shoot a bullet in my other knee, and I would not feel it.”

Gouzer and I spoke in one of Christie’s skyboxes above the main salesroom in New York; he was back in his main station after several months away. He had just had surgery related to another injury, this one to his upper arm as a result of an old spearfishing mishap. “The gods of Sotheby’s are trying to keep me in the hospital,” Gouzer said, shrugging with his one working shoulder. He was wearing a sling, but still fidgeted with his e-cigarette, occasionally puffing as he spoke about his frustration with being gone for so long.

He was not the only one frustrated. Many members of the postwar team described Gouzer’s absence to me as a distraction, especially since, when not laid up with an injury, he tends to be off heli-skiing, sailing, or Instagramming his close friend Leonardo DiCaprio’s Oscar statuette.

“I was sidelined for a while, and I was hearing, ‘Yeah, Loic’s not going to be able to put sales together without daddy,’ ” Gouzer said—“daddy” being Gorvy. “That’s the type of thing that motivates me. I had time to think when I was on oxycodone, and it gave me lots of inspiration.”

Gouzer’s hardened competitive streak is no secret. In January, he posted on Instagram this blunt message to his followers, scribbled in Sharpie on a sheet of yellow paper:

You have a masterpiece?
We have cash $$!
CALL US (TOLL FREE)
212 636 2248

The caption read: “Christie’s reloaded May 2017 first come first served.”

Many auction specialists use Instagram to promote works that are coming up for sale, but Gouzer’s approach is quite different—and a marked break from activities suited to rules of old auction-house decorum. He has 15,000 followers, and it’s safe to presume that when he posts something, a healthy portion of the world’s collectors who buy and sell at auction will see it.

While fishing for consignments in the run-up to his “Bound to Fail” sale, Gouzer posted a picture of Martin Kippenberger’s Martin, Into the Corner, You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself (1992) and said, “Would kill ?? to have in #boundtofail auction and ready to offer significant ??? for it any ideas?” In the comments section, art adviser Eleanor Cayre responded by promising that if the work were found, she would guarantee it. This kind of direct contact, with the quest for consignments played out in the open, is a drastic departure from the past sale-building protocol of hush-hush conversations and backroom handshake deals.

A frequent presence in the orbit of Loic Gouzer is Alex Rotter, who has known him since they were interns together at Sotheby’s; as of late April 2017, both are chairmen of the postwar and contemporary department. “For 16 years, I’ve walked into these galleries as the different alliance, so it was very strange to walk in here and be part of the team,” Rotter told me at Christie’s Rockefeller Center headquarters in March, days after starting the job.

The Austrian, still looking youthful in his early forties, had on a crisp three-piece suit and spoke in a Yankee-inflected Teutonic twang. “Everyone in this department, we have something to prove, and we’re excited about it,” he said. “We’re going to go like a front—as individuals, in one line, we march.” (“Without being too military about it,” he noted—“with an Austrian accent, that’s always a little tricky.”)

Rotter is especially close with Gouzer. When I mentioned his old friend, Rotter lit up and then futzed two-handedly at the inseams of his tailored suit jacket. He had two iPhones, one inside each of his pockets. He found the right phone and showed me a picture: a snapshot of the two old mates when Rotter was 23 and Gouzer, 19, with Rotter putting Gouzer into a playful headlock.

When Gouzer and I spoke a week later, he offered to show me the same picture, without prompting. “We’re bros, basically,” Gouzer said, before recalling how they met at Sotheby’s in London. “My internship consisted of cutting and pasting catalogues on cardboard files. That was supposed to be my job, but most of the time, I would just sniff the glue.”

When Rotter left England for New York, the Swiss-born Gouzer followed, only to get pushed out after clashing with Sotheby’s main macher, Tobias Meyer. Now, with years between, they have reunited. “I don’t know if you can find two people more different than us,” Gouzer said. “I can’t sit still for two minutes in my office—I’m not a master of focus—but he has a lot of structure. I use 95 percent gut and 5 percent brain. He uses more of his brain.”

Rotter left Sotheby’s during a contentious time. In early 2016, the decision to bring in Amy Cappellazzo through the purchase of her advisory firm Art Agency, Partners, caused many staffers to leave that rival house. To detractors, the notion of giving the keys to Sotheby’s to an art advisory firm was nothing less than a complete disavowal of sacred auction-house rules.

Rotter, a rainmaker in the contemporary department, took a deal to defect that had been on offer for years. “I was not happy with the direction that the company was going,” Rotter said. “It came to a point where nothing was what I wanted it to be.”

He was not the only one. At the time, Sotheby’s was experiencing a historic run of departures, essentially gutting the auction house of its storied history.

Though it might have displeased auction-world traditionalists, the current Sotheby’s model has shown signs of an upturn since the spate of defections in early 2016. During the fourth quarter of 2016, Sotheby’s posted a profit of $65.5 million, beating expectations.

Part of the turnaround owes to what can be characterized as a reboot of the concept of an auction house. In recent months, Sotheby’s has been turning itself into a microcosm of the art market at large, a one-stop-shop for all possible picture-buying needs guided by technocratic leanings at odds with the formerly genteel, mannered tenor of the auction circuit.

After confounding prognosticators by paying $50 million, with the addition of $35 million more if certain targets are met, for Art Agency, Partners, Sotheby’s made a series of notable hires and looked to grow its business with offerings such as an analytics index. A potential problem with expansion, though, is the price tag.

“Sotheby’s is throwing money at the problem in an attempt to improve their auction quality and market share,” said Todd Levin, director of the Levin Art Group. “Sotheby’s wants to become the equivalent of a Walmart in the art market. Christie’s wants to primarily focus on being a bespoke auction house.”

Levin suggested that, given the amount Sotheby’s has been paying for guarantees—$100 million for the Ames estate, for instance—and all its acquisitions, Sotheby’s may not be as successful as it seems. Money delegated for guarantees can entertain considerable risk, since, if a guaranteed work fails to sell, the house has to absorb the cost and try to sell it privately.

Friedlander, head of the contemporary department at Christie’s, is skeptical of the Sotheby’s one-stop-shop approach, which now includes a position under the Art Agency, Partners umbrella for former Robert Rauschenberg Foundation CEO Christy MacLear as an expert on artist estates and foundations. “Do we talk to artists’ estates and foundations and experts and conservators? Yes,” Friedlander said. “But we don’t do it in-house, because the truth of the matter is, our clients like to have a very neutral, unbiased approach to things. We’re able to get all those different viewpoints—we’re just not hiring them to work here.”

Between the May 2017 sales and the ones in November, a clearer picture should emerge of a post-Gorvy contemporary department at Christie’s. While some may see a certain amount of disarray, the newly assembled Christie’s team at Rockefeller Center—Friedlander, Rotter, Paulson, Gouzer, Inoue, White, Massad, Martha Baer, and the specialists—has been earning high marks for working together to build sales under trying circumstances. “There has been big turnover,” said David Nash, a powerhouse at Sotheby’s for decades who still attends sales in his capacity as owner of the Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery in New York, “but the power and reputation of [an] auction house is more important than the individual expert or department over the long term. Christie’s lost Brett Gorvy but still has Alex Rotter, Loic Gouzer, and Laura Paulson, all very successful and experienced experts, to gather works for the next sales.”

Gorvy’s former minions, who once clashed with colleagues to earn his affection, are confident they will thrive without their former leader.

“We were lucky to have Brett as long as we did,” Inoue told me. “He was a great coach and mentor to all of us—but that’s exactly it, he taught us a lot. There are new ways to approach things, too. It’s a younger generation.”

Asked later for elaboration, Inoue fixed on the makeup of the team and how the lineup works together. “To me, this group feels like a new generation,” he said. “Although few of us are actually new, it is a fresh configuration. We all have different strengths, which makes for an efficient team dynamic. Working together, we operate as a unit.”

Christie’s London sales this past March were a somewhat unexpected hit, especially its postwar and contemporary evening sale, with a $117.8 million total nearly eclipsing the high estimate and rising 37 percent above the take from a year ago. Potential clients who had been holding back suddenly seemed to think it might be a good time to sell—good news for the May auctions. The economy remained strong despite political uncertainty. And, perhaps most important by certain art-world measures, the market was ripe for an upswing. As many advisers and auction specialists noted, the market tends to work in cycles, with down markets lasting a year and a half to two years—meaning better fortune should come around the time of the May sales. Speaking with me in her office in March, holding up a ringing phone—one of her multiple phones—Friedlander told me, “Literally, right now, as I’m sitting here with you, I’m closing.”

January had already seen a couple major consignments for Christie’s May evening sale: Andy Warhol’s Big Campbell’s Soup Can with Can Opener (Vegetable), from 1962, was consigned by the Cingillioglu Family Collection and estimated to go for between $25 million and $35 million, and Roy Lichtenstein’s gigantic Red and White Brushstroke (1965), with an estimate of $25 million to $35 million.

But there were bigger lots to come for what would become a sale whose high estimate approached half a billion dollars. In February, after careful prodding on the part of a team initially led by Gorvy and Gouzer, Christie’s secured Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for George Dyer (1963), beating out competition from Sotheby’s. The consignor, Francis Lombrail, is a Frenchman who just bought a theater and thought the Bacon—which he bought 25 years ago at a Paris art fair and once belonged to the author Roald Dahl—could help pay off the purchase. It is estimated to sell for $50 million to $70 million.

“Of the small triptychs, it’s always been known as the best,” Gouzer said. “We all have our own imaginary museum in the brain when you start being an auction specialist, and I’ve known about the painting as long as I’ve done this job. I learned later who the guy was, and over time I got to know him. I built a relationship with him—we speak the same language, you know?”

It was also a lot for which Cerutti airdropped in to join the meetings. Friedlander called Cerutti “a CEO who really understands what I call ‘The Specialist Struggle.’ ” About the Bacon get, she said, “It’s a conversation that started with Loic and Brett, and then Brett left.” Luckily, she said, “our CEO came in and had a relationship with the client.”

When Gouzer triumphantly posted to Instagram an image of the work’s abstracted heads installed at Christie’s New York headquarters, Dan Loeb, a forceful Sotheby’s shareholder who wields considerable influence on its board, took once again to the comments section. “Aka Three Faces of [Loic] After a Hard Night Out With Leo,” Loeb wrote, landing a gibe about Gouzer’s dalliances with DiCaprio.

Gouzer responded, turning his aim on Sotheby’s peers who had been beaten: “Each panel is the face of Amy / Adam / and Alan [sic] when they woke up to the news they lost the painting,” he wrote, referring to Sotheby’s two fine-art division heads and its chief operating officer.

The eight-figure consignments kept on coming. Gouzer persuaded French dealer Patrick Seguin to part with Mark Grotjahn’s Untitled (S III Released to France Face 43.14), 2011, which was hanging in his living room in Paris before garnering an estimate to sell for $16 million. Christie’s also secured the estate of Emily and Jerry Spiegel, a collection the house guaranteed for $100 million. The May sale will include 26 works from that collection, including two estimated at $20 million: Sigmar Polke’s Frau mit Butterbrot (1964) and Christopher Wool’s Untitled (1988), an iconic work that screams in black-on-white text “PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE.” In mid-April, Christie’s announced that it would also offer Rudolf Stingel’s large photorealist self-portrait Untitled (After Sam), 2006, that is the only one of four editions not already snapped up by an institution. A dealer at a gallery that has staged Stingel shows told me the rarity of the work could push its price well above $30 million.

But it was a work locked up in late February that could be the evening’s biggest hit. It had never before been offered to the market—and had gone mostly unseen for decades in a collection in Osaka, Japan.

Christie’s had been after it for years, and now, even without Brett Gorvy, they had a team that could pull off a complicated drop-in mission and extract the work: Cy Twombly’s Leda and the Swan (1962), a sister painting to one in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. To make a play for it, Gouzer, Inoue, and Rotter suited up and hopped flights to the other side of the world.

“There’s a collector in Japan, and Koji got the call,” Loic said.

“We’ve been working on that painting for a number of years,” Inoue said.

Rotter joined when brand-new to the job, on his first day after his garden leave. “I was flying, not employed,” he said, “but touched down employed.”
“We did a ninja mission in Japan to get the painting,” Gouzer said.

After a trip to the Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan—Gouzer, like his pal DiCaprio, is passionate about marine conservation—the squad settled in for a four-hour dinner with the potential consignor (whose name was tactfully withheld from me) to once again go over the entreaty for their business in detail. The menu featured several local delicacies, including the elusive and potentially poisonous puffer fish, fugu.

The specialists had navigated intricate Japanese ceremonies before and, as they got closer to the end of an endurance test, moved into a carefully calibrated dance to convince the collector that Christie’s would be the house that handled the work best.

“I’m not the biggest master of zen,” Gouzer said. “If you put me in a meeting in four hours, I like to say, ‘Take the check, gimme the painting!’ According to Koji, during those four hours I broke 19 rules of Japanese etiquette in one go.”

By the time they left Japan, the Christie’s trio had secured the Twombly to go to auction on May 17, with a high estimate of $55 million.

“We knew this was a painting we had to have, especially as a young, new department,” Gouzer told me in the Christie’s skybox. Leda and the Swan had already arrived in town, and was behind lock and key in a private viewing room. He led me downstairs, moving with his busted shoulder through the corridors, and then opened a door. There it was, just installed, on display outside Japan for the first time in decades.

Gouzer threw his custom-tailored jacket on a chair, handed his phone to a colleague, and asked her to take a picture for his Instagram. She suggested that he take off his sling, but Gouzer shook his head. He already had a caption in mind, and he needed to look beat-up.

“I want it to say, ‘A Twombly worth fighting for,’ ” he said.

Update, 5:35 p.m.: Details about Patricia Barbizet’s continuing relationship with Christie’s after her departure as CEO have been clarified.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Summer 2017 issue of ARTnews on page 106 under the title “Christie’s Reloads.”

On a gray Sunday last October, during Frieze Week in London, Phillips auction house opened its new headquarters in a 73,000-square-foot building on tony Berkeley Square, with renovations by architects Aukett Swanke. Visitors sipped champagne and orange juice next to a Banksy phone booth that appeared to have erupted out of the concrete floor. The future looked promising. Phillips’s former UK headquarters, near the Victoria train station, had been comparatively bare-bones and far from the action—the action in London these days being in Mayfair, site of international wealth and branches of international mega-galleries like Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner, and Pace.

Berkeley Square is in the heart of Mayfair—Gagosian is soon to open a third London space nearby—and Phillips claimed its opening weeks saw a record number of visitors for a UK space. The inaugural sales, however, were disappointing. At the evening sale on October 15, a number of high-profile works failed to sell, among them the evening’s cover lot, an Andy Warhol Marilyn Monroe from 1986 expected to bring in as much as $2.78 million. The 37-lot sale brought in a total of only $21 million. By the new year, though, things were looking up again: following an impressive editions sale in January, Phillips’s February evening auction of contemporary art, a tight 29-lot affair, totaled $26.9 million, solidly within its pre-sale estimate, and set new records for Ai Weiwei and Mark Bradford. The house was back on track.

For a year and a half following the sudden departure of head auctioneer and former chairman Simon de Pury (along with his wife, former Phillips contemporary specialist Michaela Neumeister) in December 2012, Phillips had been in a kind of holding pattern, with longtime contemporary-art head Michael McGinnis running the show. While Christie’s and Sotheby’s saw a string of record-breaking sales—with Christie’s besting itself over and over again, most recently with a November 2014 contemporary-art sale that totaled $853 million—Phillips’s contemporary sales in New York dipped from $87 million in May 2012 to $52 million in November 2014. A $114 million sale in May 2014 was bolstered by a $56 million Mark Rothko, which was consigned by Paul Allen and carried a guarantee. In the meantime, Christie’s and Sotheby’s moved more aggressively onto Phillips turf—young art—offering wet-paint art not only in their day sales, but also in the valuable evening sales. In May 2014 Christie’s specialist Loic Gouzer organized an evening sale of newer contemporary art for the Monday night of the contemporary evening sales week, forcing Phillips to reschedule its regular sale for Thursday.

But the skies appear to be brightening over Phillips. Last summer, the company got a new CEO in 27-year auction veteran Ed Dolman. And things have started looking shaky at the other two houses. In November 2014, longtime Sotheby’s head Bill Ruprecht announced he would step down. And in early December, just as the art world alighted in Miami for Art Basel Miami Beach, Christie’s announced that its own CEO of four years, Steven Murphy, was departing. By January, art-market observers were raising questions about the houses’ profitability: with high overhead and sales that cost millions to put on, as well as the guarantees and other incentives needed to secure consignments, and money going toward things like online art sales programs, how much profit were these companies actually bringing in?

Phillips’s post-sale press conferences have long been different from the TV-camera-laden affairs at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, which offer canned quotes and Q&A sessions in the style of a White House briefing. Even under de Pury, they consisted of the mild-mannered McGinnis emerging from behind the phone bank to stand in a circle with reporters and offer thoughtful analysis. Last May, Dolman, a spry, charismatic 54-year-old Brit, not only did the same but, shortly after beginning, offered, “Shall we do this upstairs, actually? Over a glass of champagne?” The group of on-deadline journalists wended their way through the building after him and each had as much time as he or she wanted with the flute-toting incoming CEO.

Founded in 1796 by Harry Phillips, a former clerk of James Christie’s, Phillips’s history over the past couple of decades has been one of dramatic entrances and exits, and equally dramatic set changes. Auctions being in large part theater, the dramaturgical metaphor isn’t a bad one. There was the 1999 sale to Bernard Arnault’s LVMH, the grand entrance of dealers de Pury and Daniella Luxembourg in 2001, CEO Louise MacBain’s brief time on the stage (she was apparently de Pury’s girlfriend at the time), LVMH’s sale of its stake in the company to de Pury and Luxembourg, the loss of their snazzy headquarters on 57th Street, the move to scrappier quarters downtown on 15th Street, the departure of Luxembourg, the sale to Russians in 2008, the unveiling of the new Park Avenue headquarters in 2010. Since 2000, the house’s name has gone from Phillips to Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg, to Phillips de Pury & Company, and back to Phillips. Even in this action-packed context, Dolman’s arrival last year was a climactic event. McGinnis, who has been with the company for 16 years, called Dolman’s hiring “the most exciting thing that’s happened since I’ve been here.”

Dolman spent 27 years at Christie’s, working his way up to chief executive. When Christie’s hired Murphy as CEO in 2010, Dolman was made chairman; the following year, he left for the Qatar Museums Authority. After three years as executive director there, he was looking for a new job, and a return to London and New York. “I felt, at 54, I still had another gig left in me,” he told me in February. He was, he said, close with Phillips’s owners, Leonid Friedland and Leonid Strunin, who bought the company in 2008 through their Mercury Group, a Russian luxury retail company, and who are colloquially known at Phillips as “Little Leonid” and “Big Leonid.” The Leonids, Dolman said, are hands-off and share with him a vision of “high-quality presentation.”

Dolman’s years at Christie’s coincided with a sea change in collecting habits. “The profile of the collector when I started in this business was someone fairly late in life who had gotten interested in a niche market and would spend 10 to 15 years building that collection,” he said. “But now the profile is completely different. They are much younger, they have much more money to spend, and they want to put together a collection a lot more quickly. They’re a little more impatient, and the supply problem is solved by the contemporary market.”

That “supply problem” was presumably one of the reasons Phillips got out of the Impressionist/modern business: there just aren’t enough top-quality pieces to go around. When the company was ramping up under LVMH ownership and de Pury and Luxembourg leadership, back in 2001, there was a string of glamorous Impressionist/modern sales—one of which had Sharon Stone strolling down the aisles in a grab for media attention—but the house gave up on the category in 2003.

Phillips currently sells works in only seven departments: photography, design, jewels, editions, contemporary art, Latin America, and the recently added watches. The contemporary-art department was formed in 1999 by McGinnis. “It was really an entrepreneurial excursion for me,” McGinnis said. “I’d worked at Christie’s. I left there on a Friday and started here on a Monday and, with my book of clients, built a little mini-empire in a category that wasn’t the most important at our competitors’ houses. Focusing on cutting-edge contemporary—let’s call it Pop through the present—I made a lot of headway and built up a loyal following of consignors and buyers.”

The Christie’s and Sotheby’s “business models need adjusting,” Dolman told the Art Newspaper a few months ago. “They need to shrink their cost base.” The paper’s market editor, Melanie Gerlis, wrote, “Dolman believes that the ‘massive change in taste’ towards contemporary and Modern art should lead to certain departments going.” Christie’s and Sotheby’s “could shed half of their business,” Dolman told the paper, citing furniture and Old Masters. Sotheby’s, the Art Newspaper pointed out, has around 1,600 employees; Christie’s has around 2,200. Phillips has 200. In February, on the heels of that successful sale in London, Dolman talked to The New York Times, pointing to online sales as a possible reason for Murphy’s departure from Christie’s. Murphy “came in from the outside,” Dolman told The Times. “There is something to be said for mixing the gene pool, but the auction business is a tough place to establish credibility if you are not versed in it. He was very keen on developing online sales. Perhaps we should look there.”

“I’ve been in the auction world a long time,” Dolman told me in February, “and I enjoy it a lot. I watched Phillips evolve as a business with great interest from my desk at Christie’s, constantly thinking about the potential it had then as a competitor.” The potential he seems most eager to tap is global in nature. In the fall of 2015, Phillips, which currently has salesrooms in New York and London, offices in Berlin, Geneva, Moscow, and Paris, and representatives in Brussels, Istanbul, Denver, Los Angeles, Portugal, Milan, and Zurich, will open a Hong Kong salesroom. It is a clear move toward competing head-on with Christie’s and Sotheby’s in Asia, and toward diversifying the company’s client base (which has a reputation for being overwhelmingly American, though McGinnis said this wasn’t true).

In December, Phillips announced that Dolman had hired Matt Carey-Williams, a former director of mega-galleries White Cube, Gagosian, and Haunch of Venison, and a veteran of Sotheby’s, as his deputy chairman for Europe and Asia. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his comment about Christie’s, online would seem to be one place Dolman won’t be branching into. The company has only ever done one online-only sale—in December 2014—and Dolman sees the live auction business as “alive and well.” When you’re talking about people who can buy something for more than $5,000 without actually seeing it, he said, “it’s a much more limited marketplace.”)

Carey-Williams sees Phillips’s goals in China as different from those of the other two houses, or those of anyone who thinks “the only people from Asia looking to bid on art are the ones looking to buy $100 million Bacons.

“That could not be further from the truth,” he said. “I think your average collector in Hong Kong is going to be more interested in owning a piece by Jonas Wood, or Tauba Auerbach, or Julie Mehretu than they are in owning a $20 million [Piero] Manzoni, or a $30 million Gerhard Richter.

“This is a marketplace that’s been very sophisticated for a long time,” he continued, pointing to collectors like the Chinese Indonesian entrepreneur Budi Tek, who is known for his acquisition of challenging, monumental works by contemporary artists like Maurizio Cattelan and Anselm Kiefer, and who recently opened a private museum in Shanghai and is planning an art park in Bali. “It’s just that there haven’t been many people operating there.”

For Phillips, there is a lot of potential in China. “Some of our biggest clients are people who have yet to buy,” he added.

Carey-Williams said that in China and elsewhere Phillips hopes to attract new audiences by becoming an “arts destination” that will go beyond auctions to offer a variety of services, from private sales to education. Both he and Dolman were cagey on the details, but the subtext—a rebranding—can perhaps be read in the tea leaves: another Dolman hire is Damien Whitmore, who worked on branding for the Victoria & Albert Museum as well as for Tate, and was involved with the launch of Tate Modern.

“I want Phillips to be seen, going forward, as a very serious and real part of the art community,” Dolman said. “Not just as auctioneers, but broader.” Part of his strategy is a course that Phillips has used before, under de Pury: the guest curator. In 2010, Phillips brought in art advisor and former Christie’s contemporary-art head Philippe Segalot to curate an evening sale. Dolman’s approach is a bit different. He has engaged Francesco Bonami—a former Flash Art magazine editor and, from 1999 to 2008, senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, who curated the 2003 Venice Biennale and the 2010 Whitney Biennial—to curate a series of exhibitions. The first of these, “A Very Short History of Contemporary Sculpture,” inaugurated Phillips’s new London headquarters last fall. Little in that exhibition, which included work by Dahn Vo and Matthew Barney, was for sale—it was more of a backdrop for the sales—but the show Bonami is putting together for Phillips in New York at the end of April will be a selling show, with work by the likes of Paola Pivi, Roberto Cuoghi, and Cattelan.

At the other end of the collecting spectrum, Dolman is branching out into watches. In November, Phillips announced that it would open a Geneva space in partnership with Livia Russo and Aurel Bacs, who spent a decade as international head of watches for Christie’s, bringing the department’s revenues from $8 million to $130 million annually.

“Phillips is in a very special place right now,” Dolman said, “and I’m really looking forward to the next two to three years. I think if we are successful the market in general will benefit from it. It might be a grandiose thing to say, but I think injecting a little more competition and a little more choice will be good for everyone. And that’s what we’re trying to do.”

Dan Duray is senior staff writer at ARTnews.

A version of this story originally appeared in the April 2015 issue of ARTnews on page 66 under the title “Phillips 2.0.”

Earlier tonight Phillips ended the week of contemporary art auctions in New York with a small sale that saw new records for Danh Vo, Tauba Auerbach and Rashid Johnson but brought in just $51.96 million with premium, below the evening’s low estimate of $45.76 million without premium, and significantly lower than its high estimate of $67.79 million, also without premium. Of the 47 lots on offer, 39 found buyers, for a healthy sell-through rate of 83 percent.

The sale, led by the lively auctioneer Alexander Gilkes, saw healthy bidding on a number of lots, though the top two of the evening, Robert Ryman’s Hour (2001), which sold for $5.2 million, and Willem de Kooning’s swooshy Untitled XVIII (1984), which sold for $4.8 million, each sold with just one bid to phone bidders in a matter of one minute (the de Kooning presumably going to a Spanish-speaking buyer since Gilkes, the recent subject of a jabbing New York Times Style section profile, said “Buenos Dias” after noting his paddle number).

The liveliest lot of the evening by far was the fifth-highest-selling lot of the evening, a Frank Stella work of rainbow concentric squares from 1966 that had eight bidders, four minutes of bidding (lengthy for the quick sale), and eventually hammered for $3.4 million, almost double its high estimate. Stella also factored into another surprise for the evening, a hotly contested work by the artist known as Sturtevant, who copies works by other artists. That work was a Stella copy and hammered for three times its high estimate at $460,000 after a protracted late sale fight by five bidders. (Sturtevant fared well at Christie’s Wednesday night, too, where the artist’s Roy Lichtenstein double sold for $3.4 million.)

Phillips has come to be known as a place where younger artists subject to market speculation achieve record prices, but tonight was more notable for its failures in that department. Works by Wade Guyton, Nate Lowman, and Lucien Smith failed to find buyers while other works by such artists sold for sums that, while large, are now unremarkable thanks to their inclusion in sales at bigger houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s (usually during day sales). Among the sales at Phillips were an Oscar Murillo that went for $245,000, a Christian Rosa  for $161,000, a David Ostrowski for $118,750, and an Alex Israel for $341,000. Sad to say that in this economy a Wade Guyton selling for $4.6 million is an average performance.

Even some artist records did not shatter expectations. Rashid Johnson’s $197,000 achieved this evening only beat his previous record, achieved in 2013, by a mere $2,154, according to Artnet. But Danh Vo fared better. His copper statue We the People (detail) (2011), which sold for $629,000 to Philippe Ségalot, beat his previous record, also from London, by around $100,000. And Tauba Auerbach’s Untitled (Fold) (2010), sold for $2.29 million, beating her previous record, achieved last month in London, by half a million dollars.

Some 16 works carried a form of guarantee, but after the sale Phillips’ new chairman Ed Dolman said that the house had been “relatively cautious” with guarantees.

“The idea of taking big bets and spending lots of money for a relatively smaller market share isn’t very sensible,” he said. “We’re not involved in the battle between Christie’s and Sotheby’s for market share. And frankly I think there were some fairly aggressive guarantees out there in the market this season.”

It was a night where people got what they wanted at a fair price. Doris Ammann, brother of the collector and dealer Thomas Ammann, bought a dusking buildingscape by Martin Kippenberger from 1983 for $2.3 million, because it had been previously owned by her brother. “It’s like a horse,” said a man accompanying the quiet Ms. Ammann after the sale, “You send it out and then it comes back. This is back in the stable.”

No hype or sales pitch can top that, though not for lack of trying. Reproduced below in full is what Mr. Gilkes told the nearly empty room at the top of the last lot of the evening, a charitable project called Treasure of Lima: A Buried Exhibition to benefit the Pelagic Research and Conservation Project for Isla del Coco.

“And finally ladies and gentlemen, the last lot of the evening is a particularly special lot. This lot, commissioned by Francesca von Habsburg, known for her ambitious art productions. This is a lot that should appeal to the adventurous and the treasure hunters amongst you. This is a lot unlike any other. You as the winning bidder will be the owner of a beautiful GPS coordinate map that will lead you to a hidden treasure encased in a vacuum seal which will contain 40 extraordinary artists’ [work] ranging from Marina Abramovic, Olafur Eliasson, Ed Ruscha, Los Carpinteros, and so on and so forth. True bounty for the true bounty hunter. This, ladies and gentleman, is something for those who, perhaps, have an affinity for boats. The island is 550 kilometers off Costa Rica and it is the island that inspired Robert Lewis Stevenson’s great book. And so, ladies and gentlemen, with that in mind, we look for adventurous bids to get us going now.”

The lot hammered at its low estimate.