One got the same impression when Édouard Vuillard’s Fillettes se promenant, a large close-up of two young girls walking, set another record. Painted in 1891 at the height of the Nabi movement, the scene, with its simplified forms and flat contrasted colors, is highly expressive and instantly legible. These traits make the picture another icon and, in this large size, an ideal trophy. Not many ran after it, though. Although the painting made a huge $8 million, the hammer price was only $100,000 above the low estimate. Here, too, the Christie’s team must have worked hard singing the picture’s merits to prospective clients. And one or two bidders are enough to make the difference between triumph and failure.

In short, in the market today, discourse matters more than artistic merit. Even famous names may fail to help works jump their reserve hurdles when connoisseurship is needed to apprehend their beauty and so accept high estimates. Van Gogh’s View at the Edge of Paris with a Farmer Carrying a Spade on his Shoulder, an admirable landscape painted on the outskirts of Paris in 1887, when the Dutch-born master had just discovered Impressionism, crashed unsold that evening, as Burge called out a fictitious $8 million bid, far below the $13 million low estimate. The picture betrays the artist’s familiarity with Alfred Sisley’s and Pissarro’s Divisionist paintings, and yet it is utterly different. Van Gogh’s intense color dots sparkle, and his composition has a directness alien to both Impressionists. The painting is a landmark in his oeuvre, an early dated example of his radical transformation of Impressionism from naturalism to expressiveness, realized through color and brushwork.

The failure of this marvelous van Gogh was sandwiched between the $1.2 million sale of Degas’s Danseuse au tambourin, a weak ballet scene left knocking about the painter’s studio at his death, as indicated by a stamped signature supplied by the estate, and the unloading of Gauguin’s 1892 Te fare Hymenee (La maison des chants), a Tahitian scene probably executed in a moment of profound exhaustion or bewilderment, bought by an anonymous telephone bidder for $8.4 million.

The same bidder also bagged a Degas pastel with a stamped signature, Trois danseuses, for $4.3 million, nearly 20 percent below the low estimate. The buyer may have felt that these acquisitions were bargains. Unfortunately, they betray closer familiarity with price charts and other market research than with art.

In the Sotheby’s evening sale, on May 7, which Tobias Meyer conducted briskly, the percentage of failures was slightly lower. Bidders, whether in the room or on the phones, appeared to have gained confidence following Christie’s performance the evening before, which had been brilliant from a financial perspective. The Sotheby’s sale otherwise bore a striking resemblance to the Christie’s evening session. World records were set, two of them for highly important paintings.

The first and most impressive record, $39.2 million, was for Léger’s Étude pour “La femme en bleu,” which carries two dates, 1912 and 1913. A reworking of a composition in the Léger Museum, in the small French town of Biot, the study was influenced by Cubism and represents a stepping stone to the artist’s series “Contrastes de forme.” A glorious pedigree and an extensive list of exhibition appearances, all in Germany (Léger first sent it to the avant-garde art show held at the Galerie Der Sturm, in Berlin, in 1913), helped the picture match exactly the lower end of its gigantic estimate. Here too competition was limited.

The next record price—$30.8 million for Edvard Munch’s 1902 Girls on a Bridge—reflected greater enthusiasm. The picture, which foreshadows Expressionism in its extreme simplification of form and the thrust in the characters’ motions as well as in the lines defining the perspective, surpassed its upper estimate of $28 million.

The search for the kind of trophies that are the flavor of the year—large works with simple forms, contrasting colors (if two dimensional) and a modernist expressiveness that hits the eye from far away—went all the way down the monetary scale. Nu à la fleur by Georges Valmier, a lightweight in 20th-century French art, was boldly estimated by the house at $500,000 to $700,000. Like much of Valmier’s oeuvre, the 1928 painting displays the influence of pre–World War I Cubism in its trompe l’oeil suggestion of superposed cutouts and that of Surrealism in its fantasy. The canvas, 38 inches high, easily met expectations, fetching $657,000.