Testing the Highs

Rolls-Royces and Bentleys jammed London's narrow St. George Street one night last week, unloaded enough celebrities to make a smash Covent Garden opening night. Their objective: Sotheby's, the staid auction house where seven impressionist paintings from the collection of the late banker Jakob Goldschmidt were going under the hammer.

Only 400 bidders and selected spectators could get into the musty, green-walled main gallery; the rest of the 1,400 ticket holders were sent to other rooms, where they could follow the bidding on closed-circuit TV screens. The sale took only 21 minutes. But from the first rap of the auctioneer's hammer, prices leaped upward at a $100,000-a-minute clip to shatter every known art auction record. Items:

P: Van Gogh's Public Garden at Aries fell to Manhattan Dealers Rosenberg & Stiebel for $369,600, highest price ever for a Van Gogh. (Goldschmidt bought it for about $15,000 in 1929 or 1930.)

P: Edouard Manet's La Rue de Berne was knocked down to Georges Keller of Manhattan's Carstairs Gallery for $316,400, highest recorded price ever for a Manet. (Goldschmidt paid $64,000 in 1931.) Two other routine Manets also soared up into this fiscal stratosphere; one brought $182,000, the other $249,200.

P: Pierre-Auguste Renoir's La Pensee went to London Dealer Edward Speelman for $201,600.

But not even the inflated art market or the evening's glamour prepared the assembled company for the price fetched by Cezanne's Boy in Red Vest. After the last significant lift of an eyebrow and meaningful tug at a vest. Carstairs Gallery's Keller had outbid all others by offering a fabulous $616,000. It was the highest price ever paid at auction for any painting (previous auction high: $360,000 paid for Thomas Gainsborough's Harvest Wagon in Manhattan in 1928).

Staggered and stunned, bidders poured into the night air, set off for consolation champagne parties, tried to figure out what it all meant. Overall, Goldschmidt's seven oils had set an alltime record of $2,186,800, easily surpassing last year's Lurcy sale in Manhattan, when 65 paintings racked up $1,708,500 (TIME, Nov. 18). But it had also distorted the art market beyond both sense and sensibility, made old masters seem bargains. Rubens' Meeting of Abraham and Melchizedek, just acquired by the National Gallery, was bought last year in London for a mere $92,400; El Greco's Christ Healing the Blind brought only $105,840.

With six of the seven Goldschmidt paintings bought for U.S. collectors, the experts began guessing for whom the dealers were fronting. Hottest rumor: the record-breaking Cezanne and two Manets had been bought for Philanthropist Paul Mellon. Eventual destination: the National Gallery, Washington, D.C.

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