Do I Hear $5 Million? Sold! a "Shark Feed" Sets New Records At New

By Gerald Clarke.

Limousines glide up to the curb on Manhattan's East Side, disgorging a platoon, perhaps even a battalion, of the richest inhabitants of the planet. A seasoned observer estimates that the crowd rushing inside includes at least 100 people worth more than $50 million apiece. The fall art-auction season -- the "shark feed," as Connoisseur Editor Thomas Hoving calls it -- is at gavel pitch, and once again great works, and some not so great, are going, going . . . gone.

Such was the scene at Sotheby's and Christie's during the past two weeks as the speculative fever of Wall Street moved uptown and into the high-rent district. At Manhattan's two premiere bidding houses, the art market set almost hourly records, culminating last week in sales of some $120 million, the most lucrative week in auction history.

The gasps began at Sotheby's on Nov. 10, when Jasper John's Out the Window sold for $3.6 million, the highest sum ever paid for the work of a living artist. Last week the old master drawings owned by John Ryan Gaines, a Kentucky horse breeder and the son of the founder of the Gaines dog-food company, fetched $21 million. The top seller: Leonardo da Vinci's Child with a Lamb, a group of sketches in brown ink, which was bought by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, Calif., for $3.6 million.

The next day Sotheby's sale of impressionists and moderns set a one-night record -- an astonishing $42,372,000 -- and individual milestones for nine artists. Mondrian's Composition in a Square with Red Corner sold for $5.06 million, the second highest price ever paid for a 20th century painting (Yo: Picasso, a self-portrait, went for $5.83 million in 1981). Renoir's La Coiffure was gaveled down at $3.52 million; Joan Miro's Woman in the Night at $2.53 million; and Henry Moore's Reclining Figure (Festival) at $1.76 million. Sotheby's great rival, Christie's, rang up $30.6 million over two days. Most of the top-ticket items were purchased by dealers on behalf of unnamed clients.

Last week's impressive collections, including those of Robert and Ethel Scull and James Johnson Sweeney, former director of the Guggenheim Museum, are probably being sold now in anticipation of the new tax law, which, beginning Jan. 1, will raise the Government's take on a seller's profit. The high prices ! owe much to the decline of the dollar, which makes even a seven-figure painting seem like a bargain to wealthy Japanese and Germans, and to the scarcity of quality works on the market.

Auction fever has also been fueled by the stock boom, which has created a new class of mega-rich Americans, some of whom are doubtless more interested in the prestige that comes with the ownership of art than they are in the art itself. "A few years ago, there was only a handful of people who could bid $1 million," says Art Dealer Richard Feigen. "Today you have unlimited billions, and at every one of these sales there are new faces."

Hoving does not view them kindly. "They could be bidding on pork bellies," he says. But surely the allure of possessing something unique exerts a strong pull. When the annual income of top investment bankers ranges between $1 million and $5 million and when takeover specialists can make tens of millions of dollars on a deal, the ability to buy a Rolls-Royce or a Riviera villa is vouchsafed to many. Only one person at a time can own Mondrian's Composition in a Square with Red Corner.

With reporting by Frederick Ungeheuer/New York