The usual foraging for transactions to report in the seven figures (or higher) was a lonely pursuit this year, as a kind of glass ceiling for top works of art seemed to be stuck at the mid-six-figure altitude. “The numbers aren’t the same,” said New York’s David Leiber of Sperone Westwater, “but we’ve sold works across the board.”

Those works ranged from Charles LeDray’s tiny stained sculpture Mattress (1993), in cotton batting, fabric, cord, thread, burns, tea and coffee stains, and charcoal, which sold to an unnamed American museum for $50,000, to a 2008 Surrealist-toned painting in acrylic on canvas by Liu Ye, Miss, featuring a standing woman in bowler hat, trench coat, and umbrella, bookended by two valises. It went for a high-six-figure price to a German collector with his own museum, according to Leiber.

Another European bought Wim Delvoye’s Cement Mixer Scale Model (2009), in laser-cut, corten steel varnish, for €80,000 ($112,560), while yet another picked up a classic white abstraction by Enrico Castellani, Untitled (1964), for $350,000.

At San Francisco’s Anthony Meier Fine Arts, Sigmar Polke’s impressive Untitled (Interior) (1984), a gelatin-silver print with paint, sold to a European buyer for $500,000. The gallery also saw some action with fresh-from-the-studio watercolors by Barnaby Furnas, including Mummers Day 9 (We hopi you likey) and Mummers Day 6 (Fancy Brigade), which went for $21,000 apiece. The works are part of a new series based on the annual Mummers Day Parade on New Year’s Day in Philadelphia.

Some exhibitors couldn’t help feeling relieved from the dread of a lousy fair, a sentiment expressed by New York’s Paula Cooper, who said business was about the same as last year. “I was just very curious about what would happen. I had no expectations, and we wound up doing very well.”

The gallery sold a beautiful new Rudolf Stingel painting, Untitled (2009), measuring 95 by 76 inches and depicting a hurricane fence pattern across a silver background, for just above $300,000.

Cooper also sold Robert Gober’s A Pair of Basinless Sinks (1986) — each sink measuring 27 by 25¾ by 2 3/5 inches and made of plaster, wood, wire, lathe, semi-gloss, and enamel paint — for some $1 million.

The gallery also parted with a small (24 by 20 inches) but genuinely striking postmodern work by Sherrie Levine, Untitled (Broad Stripe: 4) (1985), in casein and wax on mahogany panel, for $125,000. “We sold mostly to Europeans,” added Cooper, “including new clients.”

Gee, where have all the Americans gone? Perhaps they got lost in Venice.

For those who did find their way here, the apparent theme, at least according to Mathias Rastorfer of the Swiss Galerie Gmurzynska, is that “longevity, knowledge, and substance are the required elements of the moment. Art Basel is very transparent in that way, because some of us have done very well, while others have not done well at all.”

Gmurzynska sold two David Smith paintings from 1964, both called Untitled (Nude), at $200,000 apiece, as well as Alexander Calder’s vivid gouache Striped Man: Striped Sweater (1953) for just under $200,000 and Alexander Rodchenko’s Untitled (Spiral) (1919), in pencil on thin cardboard, for around €50,000. The large stand featured a small but well-focused exhibition of the two 20th-century titans, who both pioneered a new language with their hanging sculptures.

On the younger side, the gallery sold several works by 30-year-old Finnish artist Jani Leinonen, currently showing in the Nordic and Danish pavilion at the Venice Biennale, including the clever collage wall relief Cap’n Europe (Romanian Beggar) in acrylic on product package, aka a Cap’n Crunch cereal box, for €4,000.

Midway through the fair, it looks as if the modern side has gained ground over what was formerly red-hot contemporary terrain, thanks to a more conservative and cautious atmosphere.

“I think we’ll see more corrections, for sure,” said one exhibitor. “The market is shrinking back to the price levels of 2005–06, which is a healthy market, in my view.”