The Crème of the Crop

Pablo Picasso Chaim Soutine Franz Kline Henri Matisse Marc Chagall Jean-Paul Riopelle Rene Magritte Olivier Debre

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Impressionist and modern works of art adorned by famous signatures nearly all head for London and New York these days. But if you dream of finding forgotten works of great originality by 20th-century masters, Paris is the place to go.

France was the heartland of Western avant-garde art for roughly 100 years, ending in the late 1940s. The country is still full of paintings, drawings and sculpture by artists who never enjoyed international attention or who fell off the radar of leading collectors. Some of the most interesting acquisitions can be made when collections, formed long ago by French connoisseurs, tumble onto the market.

Take the paintings that movie star Alain Delon amassed in the 1950s and 1960s. On October 15 at Drouot, the auctioneering group Cornette de Saint Cyr offered 40 of his pictures, mostly done by Paris school artists in the years after World War II. The fascinating session was very different from any sale held in London or New York, not just in its makeup but also in the way it proceeded.

Every single lot sold, with huge discrepancies occurring between the printed estimates and the prices actually realized. This was not due to any incompetence on the part of the auctioneer or his experts. It was partly because recent auction references to comparable works were unavailable and partly because the group had not fine-tuned every detail of the auction, as Christie’s and Sotheby’s so often do. The estimates were not geared to the highest imaginable level, with reserves systematically set 10 or 15 percent below the lower limit. The whole event felt a bit more like the auctions of olden times, when prices would swing up and down, determined solely by how keen buyers felt to acquire the art.

The comparatively modest proceeds, a mere €8.7 million ($12.4 million), would have elicited snorts of contempt from the moneymen who run the show at the two houses dominating the world auction scene. For the French auctioneer, the session was a small triumph, and for collectors who do not think only in millions of dollars, it was a sheer lark — for one thing, none of the works had been on the market for a long time.

The few paintings carrying signatures that mean some-thing to the international public achieved reasonably high prices. One of these was La vallée de l’oiseau, a 76.75-inch-long horizontal composition from 1954 by the Canadian-born Jean-Paul Riopelle. Executed in the Paris school artist’s finest manner — characterized by facets of color creating the impression of glittering gemstones being shuffled — it sold for €882,800 ($1.3 million), within the estimate bracket.

In contrast, another abstract composition, by Pierre Soulages and dated May 25, 1950, sailed far above the upper end of its estimate, to €782,000 ($1.1 million). The untitled picture may have been helped by its inclusion in a 1952 exhibition at the Kunsthaus in Zurich and, 10 years later, in a Paris school show at the Tate Gallery, in London. But what mattered most to bidders was its powerful construction and rhythm. The painting, which anticipates some of the Abstract Expressionist works produced shortly after by the New York school, is faintly suggestive of Franz Kline’s canvases crossed by bold black strokes.

The third lot in the sale by an artist with an international profile was Maria Elena Vieira da Silva’s Ruines d’Asie Mineure, 1962, which had been featured in the 1963 show "Recent Gouaches by Vieira da Silva" at the Phillips Collection, in Washington, three months after being acquired from Knoedler, in New York, by U.S. collector William Weiss (who sold it to Delon). The abstract 24.75-by-39.25-inch composition, done in tempera on paper laid on board, faintly suggests the curves of ancient Greek amphitheaters like the one at Antalya, on the Mediterranean shore of Turkey. Estimated at €80,000 to €100,000 ($113,500-141,800), it ascended effortlessly to €214,800 ($304,600). At twice the price, the Vieira da Silva would still be a clever buy.