NEW YORK—This past May, the American-art auctions earned $159 million in sales, $23 million more than last fall’s total for this category, proving that U.S. buyers are still chasing major artworks, despite wobbles in the domestic economy. The Christie’s sale on May 21 realized $72,598,750, the house’s best take ever for American paintings, drawings and sculpture, while the Sotheby’s May 22 auction grossed $87,006,200, its second-best American-art tally.

“There was nothing in the salesrooms that felt like a recession,” says the New York dealer Howard Godel. “The numbers were stronger than anyone would have expected.”

The auctions were dominated by Western art and important 19thcentury works, with 31 artists establishing new records, including Albert Bierstadt, William Merritt Chase, Edward Hicks, Thomas Moran and Frederic Remington. Christie’s scored the week’s top lot, as Moran’s shimmering Green River of Wyoming, 1878, went for $17,737,000 (est. $3.5–5 million), a record for a 19th-century American artwork at auction. Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania’s Avery Galleries bought the painting, which had been on loan from an anonymous benefactor since 1978 at the Woolaroc Museum, in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Later in the session, an unidentified museum bought Bierstadt’s Indians Spear Fishing, 1862, for a record $7,321,000 (est. $2.5–3.5 million). And the verdant Sunset on the River, 1867, by George Inness set another artist’s high, selling fo  $1,945,000 (est. $600–800,000) to an unnamed phone buyer.

Bidders at Christie’s were equally enthusiastic about Western artists. A group of Taos School paintings from the estate of the Arizona rancher Arthur J. Stegall Jr. brought a combined $11.2 million, setting records for Joseph Henry Sharp and Walter Ufer, among others.

Modernist pieces were in short supply. Marsden Hartley’s rare Berlin-era Lighthouse, 1915, hit the block following lengthy restitution discussions between the seller, the grandson of Dr. Hans Hass, Baron von Veltheim, from whom the painting was confiscated by the Soviet military in 1945, and the Museum Stiftung Moritzburg, in Halle, Germany. The museum returned the painting to the family in February. The piece (est. $5–7 million) fetched $6,313,000, making it the most expensive American modernist artwork at auction. Hartley’s previous record was $2.8 million, set in 2002 at Sotheby’s in New York.

Sotheby’s stocked its session with 74 more lots than Christie’s. The star of the evening was an Edward Hicks, Peaceable Kingdom with the Leopard of Serenity, 1846–48 (est. $6–8 million). The painting had hung for years at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, a jewel of the collection and a promised gift from Ralph Esmerian, the institution’s chairman emeritus. Financial problems, however, forced Esmerian to put the picture up for sale (see page 28). Sotheby’s had tried to shop it privately for $10 million but found no takers.

“You can’t ignore the negative publicity swirling around Ralph,” says  Connecticut dealer David Schorsch. “Some saw it as a fog you had to look through to see that great painting.”

Nevertheless, three phone bidders competed for the work, said to be among the finest of the 62 versions Hicks painted of the subject. Dara Mitchell, the head of the American painting department at Sotheby’s, landed the prize on behalf of an anonymous American collector for $9,673,000, an auction record both for Hicks and for a piece of folk art. Asked about speculation that the buyer was Alice Walton’s forthcoming Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, in Arkansas, Michael Clark, a museum spokesman, says its policy precludes confirming acquisitions.

Among other prime lots at the Sotheby’s sale were holdings from the estate of Washington, D.C., collectors Gilbert A. and Anne B. Harrison. William Merritt Chase’s I Think I Am Ready Now (the Mirror, the Pink Dress), circa 1893, of a woman in a dusty rose gown, was estimated to sell for between $1.5 million and $2.5 million. The Texas gas and coal billionaire James W. McGlothlin tried his luck against more than five other bidders, including dealer Thomas Colville, of New York and New Haven, Connecticut, but it was the Michigan art adviser Jonathan Boos, known to represent the collector Richard A. Manoogian, who prevailed, paying a record $6,649,000.