An artwork caught up in the saga of fraudster art dealer Inigo Philbrick came up for auction late last month in New York—and failed to sell.
In 2023 Philbrick’s business partner, Robert Newland, was sentenced to 20 months in prison. In addition to his prison term, Newland was ordered to forfeit several artworks, among them a 2007 piece by Wade Guyton. In August 2023, that Guyton went on the block in a U.S. Marshals Service art auction at Gaston & Sheehan in Texas, where it sold for $208,000. The Guyton had lost more than half its value since 2015, when it sold for $490,000 at Sotheby’s New York.
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Its provenance traces back to Modern Collections, London—the secondary-market dealership founded by White Cube’s Jay Jopling—where Philbrick and Newland both served as directors. Whoever purchased the Guyton in Texas brought it back to auction last week at Sotheby’s New York, where it carried an estimate of $200,000 to $300,000 and failed to find a buyer.
A curious footnote: in the catalog for the Gaston & Sheehan auction, the Guyton is described as having “[l]abels on reverse from Phillips auction house circa 2011.” However, Phillips does not appear anywhere in the work’s provenance, and there is no record in auction databases of its having appeared there. Philbrick was known to do business with Phillips. (Phillips did not respond to a request for comment at press time.)
Another Guyton sold at that same U.S. Marshals auction at Gaston & Sheehan—this one a 2018 piece forfeited by Philbrick himself. It went for $215,100 and, to ARTnews’s knowledge, has yet to reappear on the market. That represents a 65 percent price drop from 2018, when it sold at Christie’s Paris for €535,500 (about $625,000 at the time).
Philbrick was convicted of defrauding art investors of $86 million between roughly 2016 and 2019, often by selling the same artwork to multiple buyers. His crimes were exposed in fall 2019, and he was arrested on the island of Vanuatu in 2020. In 2022 he was sentenced to seven years in prison and was released last year after serving less than four.