In addition to the usual crowd of dealers and collectors, Mr. Murakami was there (artists are rarely seen at auctions) as was Abdi Farah, the winner of “Work of Art,” the BRAVO reality television program where Simon de Pury, the chairman of Phillips and the evening’s auctioneer, was the artists’ mentor.
Those sightings were not the only reason it was an unusual evening for Phillips. In addition to inaugurating its uptown space, the boutique auction house was trying out a new program called “Carte Blanche.” Just as museums invite an outside curator to organize an exhibition, officials at Phillips plan to ask someone from the art world to put together one sale every season, and Monday’s was the first.
Philippe Ségalot, the debut outsider, was a fairly safe one to start with: Now a private dealer, he once ran Christie’s postwar and contemporary art department in New York, and has kept up his connections with collectors and artists, persuading them to both buy and sell some of their prized works.
It was a bifurcated evening, beginning with 33 lots orchestrated by Mr. Ségalot and ending with a less impressive group of 26 works assembled by Phillips’s own team. Mr. Ségalot’s part of the evening was a success, totaling $117 million, above its high estimate of $104.8 million. The second part brought just $19.9 million, below its low $23.6 million estimate. Still, the night’s total of $137 million is a huge number, considering that until now Phillips had never sold more than $59 million in one evening sale.
The biggest star of all was Warhol’s “Men in Her Life,” a 1962 painting based on an image of a young Elizabeth Taylor between husbands. Mr. Ségalot pried the work out of the private collection of the Mugrabi family, Manhattan dealers known for their vast holdings of Warhols.
Two telephone bidders tried to bring home the painting, which was expected to fetch around $50 million but ended up selling to an unidentified client of Mr. Ségalot’s for $63.3 million. It was the second-highest price ever paid for a Warhol, after the $71.7 million paid at Christie’s in 2007 for “Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I),” from 1963.
The Warhol was the first test of a week filled with 1960s Warhols. Sotheby’s sale on Tuesday night features one of the artist’s famed paintings of a Coca-Cola bottle, and Christie’s on Wednesday evening has an important image of a Campbell’s Soup can.
(Final prices include the buyer’s commission to Phillip’s: 25 percent of the first $50,000; 20 percent of the next $50,000 to $1 million; and 12 percent of the rest. Estimates do not reflect commissions.)
Another big star on Monday night was a Murakami sculpture, “Miss Ko2,” a six-foot-tall sculpture of a sassy cocktail waitress, which was estimated at $4 million to $6 million. Jose Mugrabi, the dealer who sold the Warhol, could not resist the urge to shop, paying $6.8 million.
Mr. Ségalot has championed the career of the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan for more than a decade, and had two works by the artist in the sale. Adam Lindemann, a New York collector, was selling “Charlie,” a sculpture of Mr. Cattelan as a little boy riding a tricycle. The remote control toy/sculpture, which was expected to sell for $2 million to $3 million, rode into the salesroom before being claimed by a telephone bidder for $2.9 million.
And “Stephanie,” a naked bust of the model Stephanie Seymour, wife of the newsprint magnate Peter Brant (who was at the sale, although not bidding), from 2003, had an estimate of $1.5 million to $2 million; it was also bought by Mr. Mugrabi, for $2.4 million.
The sale had some particularly rare work in it, like “Untitled (Portrait of Marcel Brient),” nearly 200 pounds of individually wrapped blue cellophane candies with the word “Passion” on them, which Felix Gonzalez-Torres created in 1992. Estimated at $4 million to $6 million, it went for $4.5 million, a record for the artist at auction.
A cast aluminum sculpture by Thomas Schütte, “Grosse Geist No. 15,” an eight-foot-tall sculpture of a ghostly figure, sold to a telephone bidder for $3.6 million.
Among those items that went unsold in Mr. Ségalot’s sale were works by Mr. Koons, Steven Parrino and Paul McCarthy.
There were more disappointments. The second part of the evening — Phillips’s general sale — was helped by the energy from the first, but not enough. Among the casualties was another Koons, “Caterpillar Ladder” from 2003. Nobody met its $5.5 million to $7.5 million estimate. But “Sex at Noon, Taxes,” a 2002 painting by Ed Ruscha, brought $3.8 million or $4.3 million including fees, at its high $4 million estimate.
Afterward, Mr. Ségalot was trying to put some perspective on the evening. “There were some fantastic prices,” he said. “Still I was disappointed three works didn’t sell.” Then he paused and added: “Auctions are not a perfect science. I guess they’re always unpredictable.”
