COLOGNE, Germany— Talk about a poisoned chalice. When Los Angeles gallerist Daniel Hug took the job of director of the 43-year-old Art Cologne fair last year, he may have been able to sense the glimmerings of a global economy gone sour, but hardly could have predicted the utter nose dive things would take last fall. And yet, with the 43rd edition having just closed last week, it looks like Hug has pulled off a decent debut, scoring points with dealers for responding to their concerns, and setting up a lively environment that attracted collectors, even if they weren’t opening their wallets very wide.

Hug’s appointment was announced last March, a month before the 2008 edition opened, amidst criticism from powerful German dealers like Christian Nagel and Monika Sprüth that Art Cologne had experienced a “bitter loss of status” in recent years. (The tea leaves could be read in the attendance figures: The fair reportedly had around 60,000 visitors in 2007, down 10,000 from the year before.) Former director Gerard Goodrow had already winnowed down the exhibitor count for the 2008 edition, in an effort to separate the wheat from the chaff, and Hug then slashed some 30 dealers, reducing the total count to 180, and moved the fair to the more convenient Hall 11 of the Cologne Exhibition Center.

This year, the first artwork visitors saw upon arrival was a 20-foot-long bronze sculpture of a fallen Icarus by Stephan Balkenhol, a somewhat inauspicious image, given talk that the global art-fair explosion, the epitome of the recent boom’s hubris, could very well plummet under the weight of its own melted waxen wings. But visitors were undeterred, and the attendance at this year’s fair held steady at 56,500 (last year was 55,000); most dealers also expressed satisfaction with the changes Hug had made.

“Dan is a dealer,” said one. “So he thinks more about the dealers as his clients. He knows that if he’s not on our team, we’re not coming back.”

Hug also lured back esteemed former exhibitors like London’s Annely Juda and Düsseldorf’s Hans Mayer, as well as Moscow gallery Marat Guelman, which last did the fair five years ago. (Hug says he had a couple of economy-related dropouts in September — galleries from Korea, China, and India, the names of which he declined to give — and says he accommodated some cash-strapped exhibitors by making booths smaller.) The vernissage was energetic, with many collectors in town for the opening of a show of American painter Christopher Wool at Cologne’s Ludwig Museum.

For a number of years after its founding in 1967 — three years before Art Basel — Art Cologne was top dog among international art fairs, which then were few. (FIAC in Paris, another mainstay, didn’t launch until 1974.) Lately, however, Cologne has been seen as more regional. But that may not be such a bad thing. Although it boasts an international roster of galleries, Hug says, “We’re a German fair. That’s not a negative. There’s a big German art market, and it hasn’t been hit as hard as elsewhere.” He adds that Art Cologne is in “a great position” for the downturn because “it hasn’t been the scene of speculative buyers” in the same way that fairs like Frieze, for instance, have been in recent years.

As for sales, for the most part collectors were cautious and generally bought more slowly and at lower price points than in years past. Salzburg and Zurich gallery Salis & Vertes reportedly had a still life by Max Ernst in its booth for €1.3 million ($1.7 million), but by the fair’s end, said Laszlo von Vertes, the gallery had parted with five paintings ranging from €100,000 to €300,000, but not the pricier Ernst.

Other dealers even found that works over €100,000 (around $130,000), were tough to sell. Dusseldorf’s Schönewald Fine Arts parted with several small paintings and works on paper by Gerhard Richter priced at €20,000 to €100,000; last year the gallery brought, and sold, sizable paintings by the popular German artist in the millions of dollars. Also in Schönewald’s booth, and perfectly suited to the current economy, were several small, whimsical sculptures in fluorescent monochrome by Katarina Fritsch, all in editions and selling like hotcakes at prices from €5,000 to €17,000. Even if they were at low- to mid-range prices, the sales in his booth as well as the activity he was seeing elsewhere assured Paul Schönewald that the market “is still alive,” at least.

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.”

Dealers had mixed reactions to Open Space, the five-year-old section made up of solo presentations arrayed in the center of the fair’s upper floor. Basel’s Nicholas Krupp gallery didn’t make much headway selling abstract paintings by American Joanne Greenbaum, priced at $12,000 for small works and $32,000 for large ones, and a representative of the gallery said that while they didn’t regret participating — what with the exposure it provided to curators and others — attendance had been a bit sparse. And yet, nearby, Los Angeles gallery 1301PE sold several Kirsten Everberg paintings of art looted during World War II placed in decadent interiors for $16,000 a piece.

The convention center wasn’t the only place to find emerging art last week. Hug isn’t generally a fan of satellite fairs — “they take collectors and visitors out of the main fair,” he says — but he was smart in his first year to give Art Cologne’s endorsement to the scrappy Dark Fair, housed in a building across the Rhine from Art Cologne and a brainchild of the organizers of the equally scrappy Milwaukee International. With its art, from 22 exhibitors who paid all of $400 to participate, lit only by flashlights and candles; its nocturnal hours (6 p.m. to midnight); its array of performances and DJ’ed events; its satirical, Onion-style daily newspaper (sample headline: “Uncool!: Some scheisse went down last night”); and its freewheeling, low-price-tag art — doctored album covers by Ajit Chauhan were going for $300 apiece at Jack Hanley Gallery — the Dark Fair was the perfect antidote to art fair fatigue. It also had an artwork that could stand for both the market boom that just ended and its painful hangover: In New York dealer Leo Koenig’s booth was a piece by Tony Matelli that, through clever engineering, made it look as though a stack of €500 notes was on fire — a real flame sprouted from it — without ever really burning. It sold, for $14,000.