Auctioneer Tobias Meyer, never known for his speediness with the hammer, seemed particularly patient over the course of the evening, with the audience groaning audibly as he accepted another bid on lot 17—a Bonnard landscape that sold for a below-estimate $1.45 million—when the sale was already at minute 35. (All prices include buyer's premium.)

But don't knock it if it works. Of the 71 lots on offer, 11 went unsold, a fine sell-through rate of 84 percent by lot, though there was a workmanlike feel to the affair: just 19 lots sold above estimate. The grand total fell within the presale estimate of $162.5 million to $235.1 million, but is was much closer to the lower end than the higher end, since those ranges are calculated sans premium.

The top lot, Cézanne's Les Pommes (1889–90), saw a back and forth between David Norman, co-chairman of Impressionist and modern art worldwide for Sotheby's, and former Sotheby's director of private sales, Stephan Connery (now an art advisor), who bid while speaking on a cell phone in the front row. After six minutes it went to the phone for $37 million at hammer, $41.6 million with premium.

Georges Braque earned a new artist record with Paysage à la Ciotat (1907), which sold for $15.8 million to Emmanuel Di Donna, another Sotheby's vet, of the uptown gallery Blain Di Donna. It was an impressive price, as that the piece had sold at Sotheby's New York for just $3.1 million in 2001.

A Rodin sculpture, Le Penseur, Taille de la Porte dit Moyen modèle, conceived in 1880 and cast 1906, sold for $15.3 million, the most ever paid for a cast of the famous Thinker, beating another sold at Sotheby's New York in 2010 for $11.8 million. It's also the second-priciest Rodin ever sold at auction, not far behind a piece that sold at Christie's New York in 2008 for $19 million, though that work was six feet tall, and the Thinkers referenced here were each a modest two feet.

A surprising number of bids came from the back of the room, to less well known faces, though the vast majority of the lots sold to Sotheby's employees representing clients on the phones. At one point a rep on the phone spotted a bid in the room and gleefully, loudly pointed it out to Mr. Meyer, who had already seen it.

"I know," Mr. Meyer said flatly to the phone bank, his hand already outstretched to the room bidder. "That is the bid I am taking."

Helly Nahamad, who was recently arrested on charges including money laundering and racketeering, sat next to his brother Joseph in his usual spot in the front row, though in an out-of-character move, seemed not to bid on much. Upon leaving he threw his arm around a solicitous reporter and said, "Unfortunately my lawyer has advised me not to talk about about anything," with a surprising amount of irony (given that he probably was told that).

Much, much more unexpected was the presence of LL Cool J in a skybox above the auction room. Given the slow pace, it was impossible not to look at him, up there in his grey hoodie, and wonder what he was doing. Sometimes he ate some kind of complimentary snack out of a crystal bowl. Occasionally he stood up.

It's not clear that he bought anything, but he did leave just after the woman in his box hung up the phone, following the sale of 1969 Picasso musketeer painting, lot 36, for $9.69 million. He kissed both her cheeks and left with two other people. (If he did buy that one, he also bought a Henry Moore, which sold to the same phone bidder, two lots prior, for $725,000, with premium.)

"It's very nice when a plan comes together," said Simon Shaw, head of department for Impressionist and modern art, at a press conference after the sale. "We did feel in putting this sale together that we did have an extraordinary group of material—especially the estate properties."

Mr. Di Donna agreed on that count. "The Lewyt Collection was of great quality," he said, referring to the collection which provided the  Cézanne and a Modigliani that made $25.9 million. Even if it is increasingly rare to see many blockbuster top lots in Impressionist-modern auctions, he said, "The quality is still there in the top one, two, three lots, always."

Christie's kicks off its Impressionist and modern auctions with an evening sale tomorrow.

(All auction data courtesy Artnet.)

'Punch Bag' (1983) by Jean-Michel Basquiat, at Sotheby’s. (Courtesy Sotheby's)

There’s something jarring about seeing the walls of Sotheby’s gleaming Upper East Side headquarters covered in graffiti.

It isn’t actual graffiti, of course, in Sotheby’s second-floor gallery, S2—it’s photographs of graffiti. And it isn’t by just any graffiti artist. With the paintings and drawings in its new exhibition “Man Made: Jean-Michel Basquiat,” Sotheby’s is betting that, even after the high attendance—some 2,000 people on a weekday—at Gagosian Gallery’s recent exhibition of the street artist-turned-art star, New York isn’t Basquiat-ed out. And if the line stretching from Gagosian midway down 24th Street on April 6—the day that show closed—was any indication, it’s right.

“I have to say it, to walk into Gagosian’s show at the opening, there was a buzz that I have not seen” before, said Alexander Rotter, head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s. He and Miety Heiden, senior vice president and senior specialist in contemporary art, who organized the Sotheby’s exhibition, gave Gallerist a sneak peek at the show while it was being installed. “I’m thinking we’re going to create that buzz too.”

Of course, this is Sotheby’s, and as much as the new show may attract crowds, it’s aimed squarely at the market. Basquiat’s work has been shattering records at auction recently. The Sotheby’s show opens May 2, and it will still be up in two weeks when Christie’s, its archrival, puts on the block a 1982 painting of two totemic figures with dripping, masklike faces. That painting, consigned by Tiqui Atencio and estimated at between $25 million and $35 million, is poised to break the current Basquiat record of $26.4 million, set at Christie’s in November for a painting of a fisherman.

The Sotheby’s show—31 works, 80 percent of which are for sale at prices as low as $20,000 (for works on paper) and ranging up to $3.6 million to $15 million for paintings—has been in the works for a year, and it raises the question, especially with regard to pieces closer to that $15 million mark, of why Sotheby’s would mount an exhibition rather than put these pieces up for auction, where it takes just two avid bidders to send an artwork into the stratosphere. The answer: discretion. “In a private-sale scenario,” Mr. Rotter said, “it doesn’t get screamed to the world.” An exhibition—one that falls during the major biannual contemporary art auctions and the popular Frieze art fair on Randall’s Island—got the house pieces it wouldn’t otherwise have had access to, Ms. Heiden said. (Sotheby’s will include one Basquiat canvas, estimated at $7 million to $9 million, in its May 14 Contemporary Art Evening Auction.)

As lavishly as Mr. Rotter praises the Gagosian show—“one of the most spectacular shows that I’ve seen”—he said the Sotheby’s exhibition “is going to feel much more cohesive.” As opposed to Gagosian’s traditional white-box approach, the auction house has gone heavy on atmosphere, with those large photographs of graffiti and dramatic midnight blue walls.

“It’s really like ’80s music,” said Mr. Rotter. “We’re trying to make a good record; Larry’s doing a compilation of best of. Sometimes the good record, even though it doesn’t have the great songs, is the better listening experience.”

The two exhibitions have at least one thing in common: Basquiat’s old pal Glenn O’Brien, who led a tour of the Gagosian show and has written a rollicking essay for the Sotheby’s catalog (“He was in Star Trek territory boldly going where no man had gone before. He was rocking the boat, playing against the paradigm and winning.”). Mr. O’Brien also consigned three drawings to “Man Made”—the only works in the show that, as it happens, were not authenticated by the Basquiat Authentication Committee before it disbanded last September. No matter, said Ms. Heiden. “We don’t see an issue, because we know exactly where [they] come from.”

Luckily for the market, the Basquiat well is deep. He produced nearly a thousand canvases and thousands of drawings before he died of a drug overdose at age 27 in 1988. Many of the works in “Man Made” have rarely, if ever, been loaned to exhibitions or appeared at auction. Sotheby’s is keeping mum on the identity of the consignors, but many of the pieces, Ms. Heiden said, are from private European collectors. (One painting was made on a mattress both Basquiat and Andy Warhol had slept on at dealer Bruno Bischofberger’s house in Switzerland.) The booming Basquiat market is bringing some lower-profile collectors out of the woodwork. “Even if the names of these people come out,” said Mr. Rotter, “people will say, ‘Who is that?’”

But boldface names like prodigious Basquiat collector (and dealer) Alberto Mugrabi will surely be on hand for the May 1 party featuring a performance by Swizz Beatz, who has a tattoo portrait of Basquiat on his forearm. “I was with him the other day and he showed it to me, and I was pretty impressed,” Mr. Mugrabi told Gallerist. “I showed him my tattoo of Basquiat, a little crown that I got like 20 years ago. We definitely connected.”

(Courtesy Sotheby's, via ArtDaily)

A sale at Sotheby's Contemporary Art Doha last night achieved a total of $15,199,750, the highest price ever for an auction of contemporary art in the Middle East.

The top lot was Donald Judd's Untitled (Bernstein 90-01), which sold for just over $3.5 million. Other works included Julie Mehretu's Rising Down, which sold for $3 million, and Icons of the Nile by Chant Avedissian, which set a record for a living Arab artist at $1.56 million.

ArtDaily quotes Robin Woodhead, chairman of Sotheby's International, as saying, “Tonight’s sale in Doha demonstrates unequivocally Qatar’s central role as a cultural hub of the entire MENA Region. Sotheby’s ability to attract bidding from collectors from 15 countries across four continents here this evening affirms the growing importance of Qatar in the international art world.”

One of the items from the sale. (Courtesy Sotheby's)

A Sotheby's auction of pre-Columbian art in Paris today fell short of expectations following negative press over how some of the artifacts sold in it were obtained. The New York Times has the story.

Four countries—Mexico, Peru, Guatemala and Costa Rica—had urged Sotheby's to stop the sale, which garnered just $13.3 million, well below the presale estimates of $19 million to $23 million.

The countries objecting to the sales said they were improperly removed from their home countries, or were fake.

Eva Gonzalès, 'La demoiselle d’honneur,' 1879, estimated $400,000–$600,000, sold $2,546,500 (Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium)

Both Christie’s and Sotheby’s saw unexpected gains and failures last night at their respective Old Masters sales, Albrecht Dürer: Masterpieces from a Private Collection and the evening session of Property from the Estate for Giancarlo Baroni.

At Sotheby’s, the biggest surprise was the runaway success of the evening’s final lot, La Demoiselle D’Honneur (1879), a pastel on canvas portrait of a pensive bridesmaid by Eva Gonzalés (the muse and sole pupil of Édouard Manet). Estimated at just $600,000 on the high end, the piece sold for over $2.5 million, setting a new record for the artist at auction. Meanwhile, the highest estimated lot, The Entombment of Christ (1571-72) by El Greco, fell short of its $1 million presale estimate, though it was still the third-biggest sale of the evening. Of last night’s 69 lots, 43.5 percent exceeded their estimates while 16 percent failed to sell. Results are pending for the second session of Sotheby’s Baroni sale, which started today at 10 a.m. and consists mostly of drawings and antique frames.

Over at Christie’s, Dürer’s famous Rhinoceros (1515) charged past its $150,000 high-end estimate, bringing in $866,500—more than higher estimated lots like St. Eustace (1501), which sold for $722,500, and Melancholia I (1514), which went for $530,500. The biggest flop was Knight, Death and the Devil (1513), which was expected to rake in $500,000 to $700,000, but failed to garner any bids. The $6 million total earnings from the sale landed within the estimated range of $4.6 million to $9.6 million. Read Bloomberg’s report on the Christie’s auction here.

Update, Jan. 30, 5:45 p.m.: The results from the day session of the Property from the Estate for Giancarlo Baroni sale at Sotheby's are in. The auction exceeded its estimates ($8.4 million to $12.1 million), bringing in a total $13,859,634. Of the 214 lots, 69 percent sold. The evening session alone pulled in $11.6 million, surpassing its pre-sale high estimate of $9.4 million, with over 84 percent of lots sold, according to a press release.

Overall, the top lots at the Christie’s Old Masters Week sales are far larger than those at Sotheby’s. The crown jewel of the Christie’s sales is Agnolo Bronzino’s Portrait of a Young Man With a Book, estimated from $12 million to $18 million, which will appear in the Renaissance auction on Jan. 30. That sale will also include Christie’s next biggest lots: Fra Bartolommeo’s The Madonna and Child (estimated at $10 million to $15 million) and Sandro Botticelli’s so-called Rockefeller Madonna (estimated at $5 million to $7 million). The top lot at Sotheby’s, Pompeo Batoni’s Susanna and the Elders, is estimated from $6 million to $9 million—just half of the Bronzino portrait's estimated cost. It will appear in Important Old Master Paintings and Sculpture sale on Jan. 31.

“You might want to see what happens after the sale,” said Christopher Apostle, head of Old Master paintings at Sotheby’s, regarding the discrepancy between the two houses. “You can have an expensive lot and not do particularly well with it.” Mr. Apostle added that he often finds it “better to have a deeper sale” with more range and lower-priced lots. Last year at Christie's, the Old Master work with the highest presale estimate (Hans Memling’s The Virgin Nursing the Christ Child, estimated at $8 million on the high end) did not sell at all.

“There are not many people that can buy a $12 million picture. There aren’t many people that can buy a $1 million picture; but there are more,” said Mr. Apostle. During last year's Old Masters Week, Sotheby’s sales totaled about $70 million, while Christie’s brought in $52 million.

Regardless of how the price tag on Susanna and the Elders compares to that of the Bronzino, the painting is nothing to scoff at, according to Mr. Apostle, who called it a “masterpiece” that could “hang on any museum wall.”

“There aren’t a lot of Old Master paintings that become available at this level, and I suppose to some degree we’ve had the good fortune this year of getting maybe a slightly larger group of the very highest end of these pictures in our sale, but [Sotheby's does] as well, it just sort of varies from year to year,” said Alan Wintermute, head of sale in the department of Old Master & early British paintings at Christie’s.

Mr. Wintermute attributed the high value of this year’s Old Masters Week auctions to a variety of factors. “These are particularly good sales,” he said. “Some of that is frankly just luck, things that appear at a certain moment or that we work on for a long period of time that come to fruition” in addition to the overall strength of the market.

In terms of long-term efforts paying off, The Embroiderer by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, estimated from $3 million to $5 million, is a prime example. “We’ve been dealing with the client over a period of some years now,” said Mr. Wintermute. “We really approached her some time ago. It wasn’t that she was reluctant to sell it, but it was a long process to make her feel comfortable that this was the right moment to do it and the right way to do it.” The painting will go up for auction in Old Masters Paintings Part I on Jan. 30 alongside other big lots like Giovanni Paolo Panini's View of the Campidoglio, Rome, also estimated from $3 million to $5 million.

Both Mr.Wintermute and Mr. Apostle observed that collectors are seizing the opportunity to sell. “People are looking at this as a good moment to sell things that they’ve maybe been holding back on,” said Mr. Wintermute. Part of that, they noted, is the security that comes with buying artists with proven enduring value.

“We deal with people who have a long historic record of being valuable,” said Mr. Wintermute, citing artists like Chardin, Raphael and Botticelli. “These are artists who have stood the test of time for centuries, and so people I think have a sense of security in spending money, even pretty large sums of money, to acquire work by those artists.”

Click the slide show above to view the top lots at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. The full schedules of their Old Master Week auctions are below:

Sotheby’s: “Property from the Estate of Giancarlo Baroni” (Jan. 29); “Old Masters Drawings” (Jan. 30); “Important Old Master Paintings and Sculpture” (Jan. 31 - Feb. 1.); “Old Master and 19^th Century European Paintings and Drawings, Including Porperty from the Estate of Giancarlo Baroni” (Feb. 1 - Feb. 2).

Christie’s: “Albrecht Durer: Masterpieces from a Private Collection” (Jan. 29); “Old Masters Paintings Part I” and “Renaissance” (Jan. 30); “Old Master & Early British Drawings & Watercolors Including an Important Canadian Collection and a Distinguished Private Collection” and “Old Master Paintings Part II” (Jan. 31).

'Autumn Leaf II' (1927) by O'Keeffe. (Courtesy Sotheby's)

It's really shaping up to a banner month for the art market. Just weeks after solid results at the big fall sales, Sotheby's posted a $27.6 million result at its American art sales today, with a fine 80.3 percent of lots finding buyers. Including premium, that result was good enough to beat the house's high estimate of $24.2 million.

Nine of the top 10 lots surpassed their high estimates, with the top two lots by Georgia O'Keeffe. Her 1927 Autumn Leaf II, rich with all sorts of reds, oranges and burgundies, made $4.3 million on a $1.5 million to $2.5 million estimate, and her 1938 A White Camellia made $3.2 million against its $1.2 million to $1.8 million estimate.

A super beautiful Arthur Dove, Town Scraper (circa 1933), which shows a curvy tractor-like vehicle against an undulating rural landscape, sold for $1.2 million, almost exactly twice its high estimate. If the new owner of that work wants to bring a great deal of happiness into the life of an art-loving art writer, he or should can get in touch via the 'tip box' at the right.

That $375.1 million figure edged out the total combined value of last week's uneven Impressionist and Modern art evening sales at Sotheby's and Christie's, which together brought in about $368 million.

The sale was bolstered by an impressive 1954 Mark Rothko and one of Francis Bacon's iconic Pope paintings, also from that year. The record-setting Pollock went for $40 million in just three minutes, shooting up from an opening bid of $20 million, a testament to just how rarely the artist comes up at auction and the eagerness of those looking to buy him.

The Rothko, owned by Sotheby's longtime chief auctioneer and chairman John Marion, saw spirited bidding from the room and from the phones. David Nahmad had a shot at this cover lot at $38 million, but as other bidders fell away, Sotheby's Chairman Lisa Dennison and Charlie Moffett, vice chairman at the Impressionist and Modern department, bid it past its high estimate, on telephones at opposite sides of the room.

Mr. Moffett's bidder made a few aggressive offers, jumping from $41 million to $43 million, and later from $56 million to $60 million, but each time Ms. Dennison's bidder parried with another $1 million increment. However, in the end, he outlasted her, and after eight minutes Mr. Meyer hammered down lot 19, for Mr. Moffett, at $67 million—$75.1 million with premium.

The Rothko, No. 1 (Royal Red and Blue), is now second in the artist’s record book only to the 1961 Orange, Red, Yellow, which earned $86.9 million at Christie’s New York in May. That sale made $388.5 million, the most ever for any contemporary auction, an accolade this evening's sale missed by only about $13 million.

"This painting is from one of the most important periods for Rothko," said Bonnie Clearwater, director and chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, and former curator of the Mark Rothko Foundation, after the sale. A formative trip to Europe by Rothko just before 1954 led to his discovery of the effect of candles flickering on frescos, and after this time one sees the colors usually associated with the more desirable Rothkos. "After this trip, the colors were more strident," Ms. Clearwater said, "They seem to fight with each other, the layers of green, orange and magenta. Before this they were more chalky."

Andy Warhol also had a particularly good evening, with seven of his eight works on offer selling for a total of $54 million, well above a high estimate of $45 million expected for that selection, thanks to a well-stocked grouping of his highly desirable "Death and Disaster" paintings. Peter Brant purchased a Green Disaster (Green Disaster Twice) (1963) from this group for $15.2 million, and Christopher Eykyn, of the Upper East Side and London gallery Eykyn Maclean, purchased another featuring the actor James Cagney for the high estimate of $6.5 million, underbidding on a similar piece, The Kiss (Bela Lugosi) (1963), which sold moments before for $9.2 million, setting a new record for a Warhol work on paper.

Such stars made up for later lots, which saw modest bidding and sold to an emptier room, one that had been exhausted by an auction that took one hour to reach lot 26. There was a marked drop-off in action after lot 40—in this latter block of 29 lots, nine (out of an auction total of 11) failed to sell and 13 (out of a total of 20) went for below-estimate prices.

Among the more highly estimated lots that passed were Jeff Koons's 1997 Bread With Egg, estimated at $3.5 million to $4 million, which failed to sell at $3 million (though Mr. Koons's record for the medium is only $5.1 million), and a Lucio Fontana sculpture, which reached $1.7 million and would have been a record in the medium for the artist had it sold.

"Well, we tried," Mr. Meyer said, as a painting by Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat passed at $2.1 million. And did they ever! The work had sold for only $400,000 when it last came up at auction, at Sotheby's New York, in 2004.

Toward the end of the sale, a large 2007 Wade Guyton painting bearing one of his trademark Epson–printed Xs sold for $782,500 to a bidder at the back of the near-empty room. The piece was good enough to beat out his previous record of $676,924, set exactly one month ago at Sotheby’s London and would fit in perfectly at his critically lauded show now on view at the Whitney Museum.

At the press conference afterward, Mr. Meyer called the sale's success an "ode to quality."

"The contemporary department was the poor cousin to the Impressionist department for years," said dealer Linda Silverman, who headed contemporary art in her time at Sotheby's between 1972 and 1983. She recalled a time when Rothkos were difficult to sell at $180,000 and said tonight's results impressed her. "I think it was an incredible collection of high-quality works of art from spectacular collections that I knew about many years ago when I worked here. I knew these collectors. They collected and waited, and chose the right paintings by the artists, and that was borne out by the prices tonight."

The contemporary auctions continue Wednesday at Christie's. All auction research courtesy of Artnet, all images courtesy Sotheby's.

Sotheby's. (Courtesy Getty Images)

Sotheby’s announced today that it lost $32.6 million in the third quarter, which ended Sept. 30, compared to a $29.7 million loss in the same period last year. It attributed part of the increase to an $11.6 million tax benefit in 2011 that didn’t occur again this year.

The slightly bigger loss amounts to $0.48 per share as opposed to last year’s $0.44 per-share loss, as per Bloomberg, which noted it was “in keeping with the 49-cent average loss forecast by six analysts.”

Conventionally, Sotheby’s sees a loss in the third quarter since auctions and private sales during the summer months are few and far between, with auctions during this period comprising between 7 to 10 percent of annual sales. The auction house’s biggest sales happen in the first and fourth quarters, like tonight’s Impressionist and modern art sale and next week’s contemporary art evening sale.

Nonetheless, there were some “bright spots” as per Sotheby’s president and CEO Bill Ruprecht, who spoke to the press in a phone conference this afternoon. Revenues were up 18 percent in the third quarter to $68.5 million, fueled by a 50 percent improvement in private sale commission revenues and a 56 percent increase in finance segment revenues.

Mr. Ruprecht also noted that sales in London last month, brought in record prices especially in contemporary sales, where Sotheby’s made “a high water mark for a picture by a living artist” when it sold Gerhard Richter’s painting Abstracktes Bild (809-4), for $35 million. “Great works of art will continue to fetch good prices.”

Gerhard Richter, 'Untitled,' 1986. (Courtesy Sotheby's)

An untitled 1986 work by Gerhard Richter—an oil-on-paper work measuring about two feet by three feet—led the first Sotheby's contemporary art sale of the fall season, bringing in $842,500, more than double its high estimate of $350,000. The sale, which took place on Friday, Sept. 21, in New York, brought in about $12.3 million, which was comfortably within its pre-sale estimate of $9.7 to 13.8 million, with 71.1 percent of lots selling.

Other highlights in the auction included Frank Stella's 1969 work Window Sketch, which sold for $578,500 and Mark Grotjahn’s Untitled (Blue Butterfly), a 2001 painting in blue, black and purple that went for $554,500. Both works surpassed their high estimates.

“We are thrilled with the results of Friday’s sale with almost 90 percent of lots selling at or above their pre-sale estimate and with an amazing performance by abstract expressionists," said Erica Barrish, vice president of Sotheby’s Fine Arts Department, in a statement. "There was great international participation and very active bidding throughout the day. With this sale of Untitled by Richter, Sotheby’s currently holds the top five sales of his works on paper globally, and this work was the second highest result for Richter on paper to date."