Last week Christie's, Sotheby's, and Phillips de Pury opened the contemporary art auction season with a spate of sales catering to collectors who buy at the lower end of the price spectrum. Estimates generally lay between $10,000 and $100,000 — a far cry from the multimillion dollar figures at the marquee November sales.

Christie's "First Open" auction on Wednesday was the most successful of the three, bringing in just under $10 million and selling 74 percent by lot and 83 percent by value. Sotheby's contemporary art sale on Thursday did almost as well — $9.1 million changed hands, which is the best result Sotheby's has had in this category in three years. A closer look at the numbers shows that only 294 of the 452 lots found buyers, making for a 65 percent sell-through rate by lot, but a relatively strong 74 percent sell-through rate by value. As usual, the estimates on works at Phillips's "Under the Influence" sale were lower on average, and the auction total came to just $2.8 million, but fewer lots were bought in at Phillips than at Sotheby's, with 70 percent of the 371 lots sold (66 percent sold by value).

Some of those lots at Phillips, however, went for prices far below pre-sale estimates, offering buyers a chance to snatch up deals. For example, John Bock's "Lombardi Bängli," which was estimated to sell for $3,000-5,000, hammered down at just $625. The top lot of the sale was Vik Muniz's "Jackie (Pictures of Diamonds)" (2005), which was bought for $158,500 — just slightly over its $100,000-150,000 estimate. At Sotheby's, Roy Lichtenstein's "Prop for a Film" (1969) was the top seller of the afternoon with a $422,500 sale price — just a smidgen over its $400,000 low estimate. "Abstraktes Bild," a 1997 work by Gerhard Richter, brought in $794,500 — almost twice its estimate — at Christie's to become the auction's top lot by a long shot.