On the Block

"SOLD--$23,000."

Hardly an eyebrow lifted when in Manhattan last week a dust-filled, muscular, melodramatic painting was knocked down for that fancy price. The painting: A Dash for Timber, by Frederic Remington, No. 1 painter-illustrator of the old Wild West, fast friend of Teddy Roosevelt. Was $23,000 high?

It was. Yet cash is plentiful in the current U.S. art market--and pedigreed paintings are scarce. Average collectors may well be confused by recent auction prices. So may experts. (The jolt of the year was a Bellini from the Jules Bache collection. Bache had paid $160,000 for it; a dealer got it last month at auction for $5,500.)

During the war years no gilt-edged Old Masters of the Andrew Mellon-J. P. Morgan class have changed hands at auction. Recent sales: a Fra Lippo Lippi, $30,000; a Van Dyck, $10,000; a Tintoretto, $41,000; a Rembrandt, $11,500; a Velasquez, $15,500. But many a painting with a dazzling signature has fetched a four-figure price: a Rubens for $6,900; a Goya for $3,500; a Gainsborough at $6,000; an El Greco at $3,000.

Conservative 19th-Century art has been sensationally bullish. Auction examples: Millet's Paysanne Revenant du Puits, $30,000; Turner's Fishmarket, $15,500; Boldini's Ladies of the First Empire, $11,000; Rosa Bonheur's En Foret, $8,000; a Corot landscape, $20,000.

Modern masters are as stable as A. T. & T. Yet a war-plant worker can almost buy a Matisse on monthly payments. Some recorded sales of big-name moderns : a Van Gogh, $8,000; a Lautrec, $4,100; a Cezanne watercolor, $3,000; a Gauguin, $5,000; a Daumier, $5,500; a Picasso, $3,000.

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