Modigliani stone head valued at $35 million leads Phillips November sales

The latest:

Phillips has published the full catalogues for its New York Modern & Contemporary Art sales, with the Evening Sale on 17 November estimated in excess of $70.4 million across 23 lots — a nearly 50% rise in value on last year. The house said the session is led by Amedeo Modigliani’s limestone Tête, carried at $28–35 million, alongside a monumental eight-panel David Hockney group portrait.

Details:

• The schedule: According to Phillips, the Evening Sale takes place on Tuesday, 17 November at 4:30pm ET, followed by Morning and Afternoon Sessions on Thursday, 19 November at 10am ET and 2pm ET. The later sessions feature modern, post-war and contemporary works spanning more than a century.
• The Modigliani: Phillips said Tête was carved from a single block of limestone between 1911 and 1912 and has stayed in the same private collection for more than five decades. At nearly 30 inches tall, the house describes it as one of the largest surviving examples in private hands and the highest-value sculpture it has ever offered.
• Museum context: Of roughly 28 stone sculptures Modigliani created in his lifetime, the vast majority now sit in museum collections, according to Phillips, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim in New York, Tate in London, and the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
• The Hockney: David, Celia, Stephen and Ian, London, 1982 makes its auction debut after appearing in the David Hockney Portraits exhibition two decades ago. Phillips calls it the most significant Hockney offered across the auction industry in 2026, but did not publish an estimate for the work in its announcement.
• Who is depicted: The eight-panel canvas shows fractured, multi-perspective portrayals of Hockney’s inner circle: studio assistant David Graves, textile designer Celia Birtwell, painter Stephen Buckley and illustrator Ian Falconer. Phillips places it among the multi-canvas works Hockney made in London in 1982 after his engagement with composite Polaroid photography.
• The Stella: Frank Stella’s Port Tampa City, a 1963 eight-pointed star in red lead, comes from the collection of Robert Mnuchin. Phillips says it is one of thirteen Dartmouth Paintings and one of only two star-shaped canvases in the series, the other acquired by Agnes Gund and gifted to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
• Other Dartmouth works: Phillips said further examples are held by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Shiga Museum of Art in Otsu, Japan, while a work in the Robert and Marguerite Hoffman collection is a promised gift to the Dallas Museum of Art.
• The chairman: Robert Manley, chairman of Modern & Contemporary Art, said the freshness of the material makes the season remarkable, citing the 50% increase in low estimate as a test of demand for works new to market. He named Clyfford Still and Alexander Calder among the masterpieces leading the sales.
• Other highlights: Manley also pointed to Claude Monet’s La Maison dans les roses, painted at Giverny in the final year of the artist’s life, François Xavier Lalanne’s Babouin as evidence of cross-category appeal, and what he described as monumental museum-worthy canvases by Helen Frankenthaler.

Background:

Modigliani’s carved heads, made in Paris before the First World War, are widely treated as the peak of his sculptural output and among the defining works of early Modernism. Most examples left private hands long ago, which is why auction appearances are rare.

Between the lines:

The pitch rests on scarcity rather than on any single price point. Phillips is leaning on material that has not traded publicly — nearly 90% of evening lots are auction debuts, the Modigliani held privately for over 50 years, the Hockney unseen at auction. That makes the 50% estimate increase a bet that fresh provenance, rather than volume, drives bidding.

What’s next

The Evening Sale on 17 November will test whether the raised estimates hold, with the Morning and Afternoon Sessions following on 19 November. Tate’s Hockney retrospective next year, marking the artist’s 90th birthday, could shape demand for the 1982 portraits.