Ever Upward

Some decades back, investors discovered the art market. Some were genuinely interested in art but were also delighted to find that works by the right kind of artists were even safer than the best stocks. The Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists, in particular, were not only sound aesthetically and fiscally but also carried social panache. The result has been staggering prices for pictures which, good enough in themselves, would scarcely deserve to be ranked with the great masters--or even with the best pictures by the same painters.

All this was decisively demonstrated last week in Parke-Bernet's Manhattan auction rooms, where Millionaire Norton Simon was putting some of his $80 million collection on the block.

An undistinguished landscape by Van Gogh, L'Hopital de St. Paul a St. Remy, joined the no longer select club of certified million-dollar marvels by fetching $1,200,000. A smallish Gauguin self-portrait, far less impressive than several others he painted, brought $420,000--an auction record for that artist. Degas's 37 1/2-inch-high La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans, wearing the original cloth tutu and silk hair ribbon Degas used, broke the existing auction record for sculpture, selling for $380,000. Ironically, the little statue was received with such hostility when Degas first exhibited it in 1881 that he never exhibited any other figure during his lifetime.

Other sales dramatized the sure-fire value of this era's art objects. A Cezanne, The Bathers, which Simon bought in 1962 for $56,000, went for $120,000. A Monet water-lilies oil bought three years ago for $100,000 sold for $320,000.

All told, the sale took in $6,506,300 for 74 works, the highest ever for any art auction held in America. Said Auctioneer Peter Wilson with satisfaction: "A real shot in the arm for the art market." He spoke as a merchandiser, not a critic.

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