The $4,000,000 Auction

"The sun is so terrific that it seems to me as if objects were silhouetted not only m black and white, but in blue red, brown and violet." So wrote Paul Cezanne to Pissarro from the Riviera hill town of L'Estaque. It was the sort ot keen observation of nature that Cezanne captured consummately in oils And last week, eighty years after he finished it, his Houses at L'Estaque sold for $800,000 to a private U.S. collector at Manhattan's Parke-Bernet Galleries It was a world's record for a Cezanne and the highlight of the biggest money-making art auction in recent history.

Contributing to the total sales of $4,141,600 for 136 works were record prices set for paintings by the Impressionist Edouard Manet and the post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin. Manet's 1866 portrait of a pipe-puffing man, The Smoker, brought $450,000. Gauguin's 1893 scene of a moon-goddess idol, Hma Marum, fetched $275,000 The highest price knocked down by a living artist was $78,000, for a 1949 marriage fantasy by Marc Chagall (TIME cover, July 30).

U.S. abstract expressionism received its first definitive testing on the auction block. The creative heyday of the movement is over; the question was, how much of it survives in cash values Of 20 paintings, 13 belonged to Robert C. Scull a New York taxicab-fleet owner who has embraced pop art. His purpose m selling was to bankroll his new foundaion to support younger artists with-dealers. "Let the oldtimers pay for tomorrow," he said. They did. Top price --$37,000--was for Willem de Kooning's 1955 Police Gazette; Barnett Newman's Tundra, consisting of a red horizontal stripe on an orange ground, went for $26,000. A 1951 Clyfford Still garnered $29,000. Mark Rothko's hovering red panel fetched $15,500. Two Franz Klines were bid up to $18000 and $19,000. What about pop? Only one work, Robert Rauschenberg's elaborate montage Express, was put on the block; it was knocked down for a record $20,000.

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