The fall auction season opened on a soft note at Christie’s Impressionist and Modern evening sale Tuesday as 28 of the 40 offerings sold for a total of $65,674,000, a bit shy of the $68.6 million low estimate.

In percentage terms, 30 percent went unsold by lot and 29 percent by value. Nineteen lots fetched over a million dollars, and of those, three made over five million dollars. No artist records were set.

Still, there were some exceptional prices, topped by the cover-lot Edgar Degas pastel Danseuses from circa 1896, which sold to an anonymous Asian bidder on the telephone for a perky $10,722,500 (est. $7–9 million).

Asia accounted for four percent of the lots sold, trailing European buyers, who snagged 42 percent, the U.S., who had 29 percent, and “other,” which had 25 percent.

The latter category encompasses Russian and former Soviet bloc states as well as other faraway places like the United Arab Emirates, but it’s safe to say that the Russians are back in the market, buying up surrealist works and the more glitzy Art Deco–era pieces such as Tamara De Lempickas highly stylized, slickly executed Portrait du Marquis Sommi (1925), which sold to a telephone bidder for a beefy $4,338,500 (est. $2–3 million).

Another Russian-taste picture, Salvador Dali’s Nu dans la plaine de Rosas, an early oil from 1942 measuring 20 inches square, made a whopping $4,002,500 (est. $2–3 million). It last sold at Christie’s London in June 2002 for £468,650 ($697,395), meaning the seller saw a handsome return.

Impressionist lots had a mixed reception, with Claude Monets pretty (read: commercial) Vetheuil, effet de soleil (1901) selling to another telephone bidder for $5,558,500 (est. $5–7 million) and Camille Pissarros Le Quai Malaquais et l’institut (1903), making a modest $2,154,500 (est. $1.5–2.5 million). The Pissarro had a dramatic back story: confiscated by the Nazis in 1938, it was recently repatriated to the heirs of its owner at the time, Samuel Fischer. That family had acquired the picture in 1907, four years after Pissarro’s death.

Sculpture, at least lifetime casts that are fresh to the market, fared particularly well. The most successful was Auguste Rodins superb Le Baiser, moyen modele dit “taile de la Porte” in bronze with brown patina and cast between 1887 and 1901, which fetched an impressive $6,354,500, more that three times its pre-sale estimates of $1.5–2 million.

Top-class works such as these proved there’s plenty of money in the market. The Rodin last sold at the old Sotheby’s Parke-Bernet firm in October 1975 for $31,000; this time around it went to New York private dealer Chris Eykyn of the tag-team New York/London firm Eykyn Maclean.

On a smaller scale and counter to the lifetime-cast theory, Edgar Degas’s Grande arabesque, troisieme temps, a 15 1/8 inch high bronze cast from the original wax sculpture sometime after the artist’s death, sold to London dealer Gilbert Lloyd of Marlborough Gallery for $662,500 (est. $500–700,000). Having last sold at auction at Christie’s New York in November 2004 for $511,000, it was pretty much a wash for the seller.

A similar fate befell another sculpture entry, Aristide Maillol's grandly scaled lead piece Monument Paul Cezanne, from an undated cast, which sold to a telephone bidder for $1,426,500 (est. $1.5–2 milion), barely topping the result made at the same house in May 2005, when it fetched $1,360,000. That result might have something to do with how reluctant sellers are to test their trophies in the currently cautious and well-studied market.

Of the rejected lots, the priciest casualty was Pablo Picassos starkly modern war-era Tete de femme from October 1943, which was estimated at $7–10 million but flopped without a single bid. It too had a back story: It had been shopped around privately, and as often happens, it came to auction with too much baggage.

An impressive though rather shopworn early Piet Mondrian abstraction, Composition II, with Red, 1926, estimated at $4.5–6.5 million, also failed to elicit any bids. Several sources identified the work as coming from the Nahmad Galleries, which acquired it at Christie’s London for £1,629,250 ($2,978,519) in June 2004.

Given the less-than-stellar line-up, Christie’s fared surprisingly well, though as Thomas Seydoux, the firm’s top Impressionist/Modern executive put it, “There’s clearly not enough good material to go around for two sales between Christie’s and Sotheby’s. Whoever doesn’t get the right material is in trouble. It was a very difficult sale to put together.”

Indeed, Christie’s salesroom had plenty of empty seats, and no one there was really expecting a miracle, given the overall mediocre cast of the offerings.

“I don’t think this is a good measure of where the market is,” said Jonathan Binstock of Citibank Art Advisory, who was an underbidder on the Signac oil Vieux port de cannes, which went on to make $3,778,500 (est. $2–3 million). “There wasn’t enough appealing work for truly discerning collectors.”

But the shortage of great work made way for some pieces that might have gone unnoticed in a larger, better populated sale, like Pablo Picasso’s warm and fuzzy Mere et enfant, a tiny, page-size canvas that sold to London dealers Theobald Jennings for $1,082,500 (est. $600–800,000).

“It’s a charming little thing,” said Guy Jennings, who nabbed the picture for a client. “It didn’t sell when it was offered last year at Christie’s with a $1–1.5 million estimate. Tonight it made the price it should have made.”

The evening action resumes Wednesday night at Sotheby’s.

Judd Tully is Editor at Large of Art+Auction.