Bullish Bidders

Pablo Picasso Titian Joan Miro Philips Wouwerman Edouard Vuillard Oskar Kokoschka Edgar Degas Claude Monet

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Did you hear the good news? Perhaps not, given the concert of lamentation currently performed on every musical instrument known to the media when the subject is economic prospects. Late in January and early February, the art market confirmed its fundamental strength through a series of sales in two radically different areas appealing to very distinct constituencies, first Old Masters and, a week later, Impressionist and modern art.

The short message is that good pictures still find takers across the board, and out-of-this-world rarities soar higher than ever. In a world in which luxury products are doing badly, this is remarkable.

To measure just how well the art market is performing, it is necessary to take a close look at the details in which the proverbial devil lies.

The Christie’s sale in New York on January 28 gave the first indication that Old Master paintings are pretty much as sought after as they were before the autumn financial troubles. The sensation of the day was Federico Barocci’s study on paper for the Head of Saint John the Evangelist in The Entombment of Christ, an altarpiece still in place in the church of Santa Croce, at Senigallia, Italy. Previously unrecorded, the sketch, admirable for its spontaneity, fascinated admirers of late 16th-century Mannerism.

The study carried a $400,000-to-$600,000 estimate plus the sale charge, which seemed huge for a work on paper (laid down on canvas) by an artist whose name means little to the wider public. But so intense was its appeal to connoisseurs that the Barocci shot up to $1.8 million at the end of a bidding match won by the international dealer Jean-Luc Baroni. While no other Old Master compared with that, the sale included another sketch in oil on paper, this time by a 19th-century master, that has the same kind of immediacy. The tiny view of the Salisbury plain done by John Constable in 1829 is more advanced than anything the Impressionists were to do half a century later. It exceeded the highest expectations as it brought a staggering $1.1 million.

More importantly, success extended far beyond extraordinary rarities.

Some paintings to which no name could be attached aroused as much interest as they might have done at the height of the market. Early in the sale, a powerful portrait presented one of those enigmas that keep art historians speculating forever. The painting was attributed to the "Circle of Jean Fouquet," which, in plain English, means that the Christie’s specialists noticed a connection with the 15th-century French master’s style, but did not think the panel portraying a ruler of the small kingdom of Navarre dated 1471 is actually his work. Christie’s hoped that it might sell for $30,000 to $50,000, plus the sale charge. Instead the portrait, surprising for its intense psychological probe, realized $206,500.

Later, another intriguing painting came up. Christie’s did not even bother to speculate about the identity of the artist working in a Caravaggesque style. The mythological scene featuring The Drunken Silenus was described as the work of "a northern artist alive in Rome, circa 1625." Its harsh subject makes it hard to sell — a man facing the viewer screams in anger as he tries to steady the balding drunkard who has thrown his arms around his shoulders, while an evil-looking satyr sniggers at them both. Anonymous works of this ilk find takers when bidders have their own idea regarding their authorship. The price, $74,500, suggests that on January 28, one connoisseur definitely had a hunch.

Therein resides part of the appeal of Old Masters, a category in which many unsigned pictures leave the door open to inspired guesswork.

Indeed, shortly afterward, there came a chance to make a small coup. A landscape with a rider standing by his horse was simply "attributed to Philips Wouwerman." In auction house conventional language, this means that the experts think that the picture just might be, with luck, by the artist. In fact, the composition of the wide-open landscape, with its delicate atmospheric handling of the sky, is typical of Wouwerman’s art. The experts’ reservations may be due to a certain fuzziness in the detail caused by wear. But the Wouwerman, which has a glamorous provenance (in the 18th century it belonged to the duc de Choiseul-Praslin, a famous French collector) still retains the Louis XIV giltwood frame that was clearly made for it. Whoever bought that for $25,000 got himself/herself a genuine, if imperfectly preserved, Wouwerman in a frame that is worth on its own $30,000 to $40,000.