Is confidence creeping back into the market? That’s the question on everyone’s mind as the fall auction season gets under way in New York. Certainly, the economic climate is rosier than the disaster atmosphere that prevailed last fall, following the global financial meltdown and subsequent grounding of the high-flying art market. Still, auction house guarantees and $10 million-plus pictures have largely been relegated to historical footnotes.

"There are no guarantees as of now, and it’s very unlikely we’ll get one," says Sotheby’s contemporary department head Alex Rotter. "It’s straight consignments and back to auction house basics."

"What falls by the wayside is the B-quality material, and there are far fewer trade-driven consignments," says Conor Jordan, newly appointed head of the Christie’s Imp/mod department. "There are slimmer pickings but choicer ones." That lean ethos seems suitable for a market that, as Jordan observes, retains "a bit of anxiety."

Christie’s season-launching Impressionist and modern sale on November 3 presents a relatively modest lineup. Among the two-dimensional offerings is Henri Fantin-Latour’s 1865 Fleurs et fruits (est. $2-3 million), a still life of a pot of China asters, a cut melon, a plate of grapes and a basket of peaches that was originally brokered by fellow painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler to Theodore Coronio, a Greek merchant living in London. Another Impressionist gem is Camille Pissarro’s plein air Le pont du chemin de fer, Pontoise, circa 1873 (est. $3.5-4.5 million), from what the art historian Richard Brettell has described as "the apex of Pissarro’s career as a landscape painter." Indeed, the picture excelled in its last auction outing, at Christie’s New York in May 1997, when it surpassed its $2 million high estimate to sell for $2.6 million. Another notable lot is the circa 1896 Edgar Degas pastel on paper Danseuses (est. $7-9 million), showing two ballerinas at rest.

Topping the sculpture entries is a rare 34-inch-high lifetime cast, from an edition of five, of Auguste Rodin’s Le baiser (est. $1.5-2 million), conceived circa 1886. The seller acquired it for $31,000 in the Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge sale in New York at Sotheby Parke Bernet in October 1975.

In the modern category is the sale’s most expensive lot: Pablo Picasso’s spare and powerful wartime Tête de femme, from October 1943, estimated at $7 million to $10 million. The highly abstract canvas, dominated by the sitter’s staring eyes and elaborate hat, probably depicts Dora Maar, the artist’s mistress and muse at the time. In a more surreal vein is Max Ernst’s eerie decalcomania painting Profanation of Spring, 1945 (est. $1.5-2 million). In this densely packed landscape of bulging, disembodied eyes, Ernst, who escaped from Europe during World War II to the bucolic eastern end of Long Island, alludes to both the disasters of war and the raw power of nature.

More meditative is Henri Matisse’s Rosace, 1954 (est. $3-4 million), a large, 76 inches in diameter, paper-cutout collage mounted on canvas, whose pattern of deconstructed rose petals and pomegranates the artist likened to a musical score. The piece, which Matisse created as a maquette for a stained-glass window commissioned in 1954 by the Rockefellers in honor of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, is considered his last major work.

The Sotheby’s Imp/mod evening sale on November 4 offers an abundance of estate and fresh-to-market material. On the Impressionist side is Auguste Renoir’s Femme au chapeau blanc, from the early 1890s. Estimated at $2.5 million to $3.5 million, the lavish oil is the priciest of seven works from the collection of the family of the famed Impressionist dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. Also on the roster are two early 20th-century pictures from other private collections: André Derain’s stunning circa 1905 Fauve landscape Barques au port de Collioure (est. $6-8 million), which last sold at Christie’s New York in November 1993 for $2.6 million, and Kees van Dongen’s exotic and sumptuously colored Jeune Arabe, 1910, depicting a bare-chested boy (est. $7-10 million).