PALM BEACH— "This is going to be a home run," art fair organizer David Lester announced with characteristic bravado the day after the opening of his American International Fine Art Fair, the event he founded in the late 1990s and bought back from the Daily Mail Group (DMG) two years ago. The results of the six-day event, which ends today, seem to have proven him correct.

When Lester relaunched the fair last year it managed to achieve unexpected success, despite taking place in the shadow of the Bernard Madoff scandal, which rocked Palm Beach society. This year, with a stronger market in his favor, he gave the event a design makeover — a full $800,000 worth of physical improvements. He created wider aisles, and carved out a spacious area in the center of the hall that encouraged visitors to linger. This last feature, as well as the benches Lester placed in the fair's aisles — accentuated with flowers, a trick he picked up from the TEFAF fair in Maastricht — seemed to appeal to Palm Beach's see-and-be-seen set, which turned out in droves, with 5,100 people attending the opening (about a thousand more than last year).

The fair has been through a number of design makeovers by now — a low point came in 2006, when, under DMG ownership, the aisles were flanked by depressions filled with gravel that spilled over messily onto the carpeting — but this time around, Lester seems to have gotten the formula right. And the Palm Beach crowd, perhaps spurred by the brighter economy, was in the mood to buy. Paris dealer Jacques Bailly sold a Jean Dufy painting, Avenue Foch, for a price in the mid-six figures on opening night. "If we could do this fair every day we'd be pleased," said the dealer. "We always sell at the opening."

New York dealer Hollis Taggart saw strong interest in works by Morris Louis, Esteban Vicente, and Picasso, and on opening night a collector put a reserve on a bright blue abstract painting by Theodoros Stamos, Delphic Shibboleth, 1959. The mood, Taggart said, was "much better than last year."

"It's the most elegant fair in America," said New York-based Chinese art dealer Michael Goedhuis, who praised the new layout. Among other artworks, Goedhuis sold a work on paper by Qin Feng, West Wind East Water, 2008, for $75,000.

"There's potential for very good sales this year," said An Jo Fermon of London's Whitford Fine Art. Compared to last year, "there's more optimism in the air," she said. "People are being less cautious, they are committing more quickly." On opening night, Whitford sold one sculpture from an edition of three by Clive Barker in the $50,000 range, as well as a brightly colored 1955 abstract painting by the artist known as Caziel, who was a collaborator of Picasso's, for a five figure price.

Positioned front and center, just inside the fair's entrance, were some of its priciest offerings. New York and London gallery Dickinson brought a lively, rare-to-market van Gogh landscape, The Park of the Hospital Saint-Paul, 1889, from a Swiss private collection, priced at $25 million. Nearby, fronting the booth of Munich's Galerie Terminus, was Fernando Botero's large painting The Card Players, 1989, priced at $2.25 million, which a collector put on reserve on opening night.

Terminus's Wilhelm Grusdat observed that attendance was better at the vernissage than it was last year, and that there were more sales on the first day. Two of his Tony Cragg sculptures were swiftly put on hold, one for $450,000 and another, positioned just outside the fair's VIP lounge, for $390,000; Grusdat quickly sold a bronze sculpture by Dietriche Klinge, Kopf Wonnebi, 2006, for $15,750, and a painting by Heiner Meyer, Capri Fisher, 2009, for $14,250.

At the opening, New York dealer Lawrence Steigrad sold a large painting, Temptation, by Swedish artist Bernhard Osterman (1870-1938), that had an asking price of $225,000. Steigrad skipped the fair last year, but did it the three years previously. "I think it looks great this year," he said. "The enthusiasm has been great."