Over at the booth of Munich’s Galerie Thomas, a 40-year Cologne veteran, director Heike Grossman said it was nice “not to have two halls with four floors. It makes it easier for people.” She said business has been a little slower this year, with collectors taking more time to think and placing more reserves. But she’d seen collectors from Belgium, Holland, France, and the U.S., and said the gallery had sold a Sam Francis oil as well as two pieces by Emil Nolde, at prices ranging from €18,000 to €250,000, and had reserves on works by several German postwar artists.

Annely Juda parted with a large abstract David Nash sculpture in red gum wood, Red Sliced Egg (2009) as well as other works, and next door, Hans Mayer, who featured a mix of pieces by Steven Parrino, Carl Andre, Robert Longo, Nam June Paik, and others, said he was “completely happy” with the fair, to which he has returned after an absence of two years. “It’s on the right path. It had become too big, too crowded, but now it’s fine.” Without disclosing details, he said he’d sold four pieces by the second full day of the fair. “When you have high-quality material, you’re not in danger,” he added.

Red dots were also in evidence at nearby Galerie Löehrl, next to a group of works by Blinky Palermo for €10,000 and two Annett Stuth photographs priced at €3,800; and Hamburg gallery Levy sold several new Mel Ramos works on paper for around €14,800 apiece, as well as, for €16,000, a 2008 painting by German artist C.O. Paeffgen that seemed particularly zeitgeisty, with the word “Krise,” German for “crisis,” scrawled across its pale pink surface.

New York photography dealer Laurence Miller, a newcomer to Art Cologne, was extremely pleased. He’d brought photographs by Helen Levitt, William Eggleston, and Bruce Wrighton — work he said was appealing to local collectors because “it’s very American” — and he parted with a handful of prints in the $3,000–20,000 range. One of them, a recent print of Wrighton’s haunting Parking Attendant (c. 1987), priced at $2,000, went to the Museum Folkwang in Essen.

Results were mixed in the contemporary art area, located on the fair’s upper floor. At Cologne’s Galerie Schmidt Maczollek, business was brisk. The gallery sold a sculpture made of green plastic tubing and metal, a sort of abstract totem, in an edition of 9, by Birgit Werres, for €8,000, as well as a Fabian Marcaccio painting, Rage-Frame-Paintant (2009), for $18,000. And notably, one of the first works to go was a large, vertical abstract painting by David Reed, #589 (2008–09), for the hefty sum of $70,000. Iris Maczollek said that in the first day she had three reserves on the painting, which she said Reed had dried with a hairdryer in his New York studio in order to get it to Cologne on time. The German collector who bought it is promising it as a gift to a museum.

Maczollek’s gallery has done the fair for four years, as long as she’s been open, in part because, as a local gallery, “it feels like a responsibility.” She appreciated Hug’s listening to longstanding dealer complaints, such as doing away with the carpet in the contemporary section; dealers used to be charged to have their booths carpet-free. “We’ve been saying that for years and he listened to us!”

Another Cologne gallerist, Brigitte Schenk, was bubbly, having sold a watercolor of a boy with a gun painted in 2000 by goth rocker Marilyn Manson for €29,000, as well a small two-panel self-portrait painting from 2007 by Hoor Al-Qasimi, who also happens to be the force behind the Sharjah Biennial. It went to a German collector for €4,000. Al-Qasimi made an appearance at the fair, and even picked up some artworks for herself, said Schenk. Schenk added that Art Cologne has always been a good fair for her gallery, and that the mood this year had been upbeat, given the circumstances. “You don’t sense the economic crisis here,” she said. She applauded Hug’s determination and persistence in pushing through his changes to the fair. “He’s very strict in following his vision.”