The fruits of a lucrative friendship between the artist Damien Hirst and his formidable former business manager Frank Dunphy, forged in the smoky small hours at the Groucho club in Soho, will be displayed before an auction at Sotheby’s in September of Dunphy’s personal art collection, which includes many gifts from Hirst.
Dunphy’s business acumen lay behind two auctions in the same premises that became art world legends. In 2004, the sale of the contents of the Pharmacy restaurant, for which Hirst had designed everything down to the matchbooks, and which Dunphy then scooped up as the restaurant was dismantled, made £11m. Four years later, Dunphy masterminded Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, an auction of works directly from Hirst’s studio, bypassing the gallery system.
The timing was extraordinary: the sale was held over two packed days in September, just as the world’s banking system went into meltdown. The final auction total was £111.5m, a world record for a single artist sale, including £10.3m for The Golden Calf, one of Hirst’s trademark creatures in a tank of formaldehyde, but with 18-carat gold horns and hooves.
Oliver Barker, the chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, said: “Behind every great creative genius is a Svengali-type character who helps unleash and channel their brilliance. For Damien Hirst this was Frank Dunphy, whose Midas touch is now legendary.”
Dunphy was also involved in the private sale of the towering Hymn in 1999, the first Hirst work to break the £1m barrier, and in buying back scores of early works as Charles Saatchi held one of his periodic garage sales of his collection.
Dunphy and his wife, Lorna, a stockbroker, said the art scene had been their life for 30 years and the works were like friends, but it was time to downsize.
“Much of it is steeped in happy memories and much of it we bought ourselves simply because we loved it. But time waits for no man and the time has come to say goodbye to some of the art, though not the memories nor the friendships.”
The sale of 200 pieces will include spot, spin and butterfly pieces by Hirst, one of his pill cabinets given when Dunphy was ill, and a painting with a typically verbose title: “Beautiful, all round, lovely day, big toys for big kids, Frank and Lorna, when we are no longer children we are already dead painting.”
The sale will also include works by Andy Warhol and Richard Prince, and by many of the Young British Artists generation whom Dunphy met through Hirst, including Tracey Emin, Rachel Whiteread and Angus Fairhurst. A gorilla sculpture by the latter occasionally joined Dunphy’s dinner guests to avoid an unlucky 13 at the table.
Hirst and Dunphy consciously uncoupled in 2010 when Dunphy retired, but they remain on good terms. The sale will include a bust made as a 70th birthday present in 2008, sketches on restaurant menus and a butterfly cigarette lighter.
Dunphy first met the artist in the Groucho at the request of Hirst’s mother, who had heard Dunphy was clever with the precarious finances of arty types – though his early decision to turn down the unknown group who later became Led Zeppelin was not his best call.
The sale is titled Yellow Ball, and includes a Hirst gift to mark Dunphy’s retirement, a circular painting of butterflies on a brilliant yellow ground, titled Smashing Yellow Ball at Peace. Dunphy first saw the woman who would become his wife when he looked up from playing a yellow ball at snooker, and the company they founded was named Yellow Ball Management.
Highlights will be on display at Sotheby’s from 22-26 June, and the full collection from 15 September, before the sale on 20 September, which is expected to make up to £8.4m.