When the first Fauve landscapes came up, prices became utterly erratic. Raoul Dufy’s Le Havre, 14 juillet, in which flags and banners project from a row of buildings over a narrow street in the French seaport to celebrate the national holiday of July 14, rose to £1.6 million ($3.1 million), well above its high estimate. Immediately after, however, another Fauve cityscape, Maurice de Vlaminck’s Le Pont de Poissy, painted in 1905 in even stronger colors than Dufy’s picture, missed the lower end of the estimate as it realized £2.2 million ($4.3 million). Soon after, the pendulum swung violently back up with Chaïm Soutine’s 1929 canvas La jeune polonaise. The likeness of the unnamed young Polish woman, done in a Fauve-influenced style, with strong primary colors but not with the same energy as the Dufy and Vlaminck, also rose to £2.2 million ($4.3 million)—more than two and a half times its high estimate.

Later, enthusiasm for Fauvism sagged once more. Chatou, le pont, another Vlaminck view, failed to match the low estimate, bringing only £1.3 million ($2.5 million). There are greater Fauve cityscapes by Vlaminck, but modest artistic achievement was very rarely considered a handicap that week. Within minutes, another auction record was set as Gino Severini’s Danseuse soared to vertiginous heights. Painted in 1915, the canvas is hardly the Italian artist’s supreme achievement: The stylized interpretation of a swirling female dancer done in a lighthearted mood fails to convey the impression of unstoppable motion that characterizes the most dazzling compositions of the Futurist movement, of which Severini was a shining light. Influenced by the geometric forms of Cubism and painted in colors inspired by Fauvism but lighter by several grades, the picture is more charming than vigorous. Such flaws failed to keep it from skyrocketing to £15 million ($29.6 million), thus becoming the most expensive Futurist painting ever to sell at auction.

The place that the picture holds in American art history partly accounts for its performance. Severini sent it on consignment to Alfred Stieglitz in 1917 for his first one-man show in New York. Later, in 1944, it was acquired by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, where it remained until 1988. Eventually the picture surfaced in Switzerland, in the possession of the famous dealer Ernst Beyeler, of Basel, from whom the consignor bought it.

When prices become arbitrary to the point of defying the finest experts’ predictions, the temptation grows among speculators to press for gigantic estimates in the hope that beginners will want to match them when confronted with very desirable works. This explains the failure of Joan Miró’s enchanting 1944 abstract pastel and gouache fantasy on paper, which came with a pie-in-the-sky estimate of £3 million to £4 million ($5.9–7.9 million). The composition, as fresh as the day it was created, was the victim of its extraordinary quality, which led its consignors to believe that anything was possible in a market starved for art.

On the other hand, extreme scarcity also has its benefits. Financial triumph is no longer confined to masterpieces painted in the style most characteristic of their creators. Works that might have been rejected in the fairly recent past can now sell brilliantly because those deemed suitably typical appear only at distant intervals—certainly not often enough for their images to be clear in the minds of the new buyers who drive the market upward.

One of the most beautiful paintings in the June 25 session at Sotheby’s was Cézanne’s Verre et poires, painted in 1879 or 1880 in intense, singing colors. The black outlines are alien to Impressionism, but there is a magic about the small canvas that sent it soaring to £4.1 million ($8 million).

And yet, when equally unusual but very subtle works appear, these do not sell easily. That same evening, Monet’s La plage à Trouville only matched the reserve. The view of the beach at Trouville, which is now believed to date from 1870 (when seen in New York in 1907 at the Durand-Ruel galleries, it was given an 1872 date), bridges the transition from Romantic naturalism to revolutionary Impressionism. It is classical in composition but heralds the future with its sketchy brushwork and the elimination of such details as facial features. The problem with most present-day buyers is that they do not spend much time taking in complex paintings, let alone analyzing unusual characteristics. The picture, which does not fit with the image that the wider public has of Monet, did not sell when it appeared at Sotheby’s New York in November 2006. It was later the object of a private treaty transaction. This year it pulled through on just one bid. Nonetheless, this museum-quality picture was worth every cent of the £7.6 million ($15.1 million) it cost, even though it failed to arouse much enthusiasm.