Day Sales Are Dimmer

The daytime sales at Sotheby's and Christie's may be less glamorous and crowded than the evening sales, but they attract serious buyers –– art dealers, consultants, and collectors –– looking for quality work at less-than-stratospheric (though still substantial) prices. On Wednesday morning at Sotheby's, "Still Life with Anemones and Poppies" by the Symbolist painter Odilon Redon, who had a major retrospective at MoMA last year, sold for $1,584,000. In the afternoon, Modigliani's "Caryatid" set the record for work on paper by the artist, selling for $1,416,000. Modigliani was also very popular at this week's evening sales.

At Christie's yesterday, a painting by the German artist Lyonel Feininger sold for $2,368,000, far above its estimate. Feininger, who is known mainly to connoisseurs, was a colleague of Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee at the Bauhaus school of art in the 1920's. Klee was also a top seller at the morning's Works on Paper sale.