It appears that Phillips’s ambitious growth plans include designs on the private sales market. In May, the auction house’s specialists negotiated the sale of Diego Rivera’s Baile en Tehuantepec (1928) to the Argentine collector Eduardo Costantini for a reported $15.7m, a record price for a Latin American artist.Costantini is the founder and president of the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires, where the Rivera will go on view in March 2017. Costantini missed out on the work at Sotheby’s 1995 sale of the IBM collection, where he bought Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait Autorretrato con chango y loro (1942) but “did not have the budget for both”, he says. The Rivera “disappeared from view” into a Manhattan collection, until August Uribe, Phillips’s deputy chairman, Americas, offered him the work privately, initially for “a much higher sum”, Costantini says. “It’s not good news for my finances, but I couldn’t wait another 21 years,” he adds.
