Christie's Does Well with Gris on a Gray Night

Auctioneer Christopher Burge consults with Guy Bennett (left), Christie's international co-head of Impressionist/modern art, before last night's auction.

In a kind of French poetic justice, yesterday's big Impressionist/modern sale at Christie's was another gray night, except for Gris. Pun intended, for those of you who know what "Livre, Pipe et Verres" means. That's the title of Gris' widely exhibited 1915 Cubist work that sold tonight for $20.8 million, setting a new auction record for the artist.

For the first seven lots (the Gris was seventh), I thought I was back in the heady times when bids were careening all over the room, smashing records. Lot 4, a Henri Laurens white marble sculpture, also set an auction record at $1.87 million, soaring well above its presale estimate of $600,000-800,000. Since I attended today in person, instead of online, I imagined that I had brought auctioneer Christopher Burge some good luck.

Then it started.

"Pahss, pahss, pahss," grumbled an elegant, elderly woman behind me, mocking Burge's British accent as he found no buyers for 36 of the 82 lots in the sale. He did it with his customary elan, seeming almost cheerful as he presided over another eerie evening of art prices following the bad example of the Dow.

The sale's hammer total was an anemic $128.26 million, against a presale estimate of $240.7-337.2 million. (The total with buyer's premium was $146.72 million.) The sale was 63% sold by dollar; 56% by lot. These kinds of numbers are getting numbingly familiar.

You can find the prices for individual lots here.

The biggest failure was Picasso's "Woman in a Corset Reading a Book," 1914-18, unsold at $9.8 million against an estimate of $15-20 million. The same artist's "Man Seated on a Chair" was another expensive failure at $5.2 million against an estimate of $10-15 million. A 1936 Matisse painting of a reclining nude, which had been in the Museum of Modern Art's celebrated 1992 Matisse retrospective, foundered at $8.2 million, against an estimate of $12-18 million.

At the press post mortem, Burge conceded that we are experiencing "a reduced level of prices" and added that the next round of presale estimates is going to have to be "lower than this time." But he argued that the over-$400 million total of this week's evening sales at the Christie's and Sotheby's showed that "there is definitely a market for good works of art."

Maybe, but it's a helluva lot weaker than it used to be.

Burge, who started in the business in 1968 and has survived the art-market slumps of 1974, 1981, 1991 and 2001, managed somehow to seem ebullient during and after this rocky outing. He implored the assembled scribes to be fair in our coverage and headlines, so I asked him what his suggested headline would be:

Remarkable Resiliency in the Art Market, Given Financial Turmoil in the World

I would say that "remarkable resiliency" accurately describes the auctioneer, but not today's market.