New Record

The art market is still roaring upwards and testing previous highs. Last week the center of action was Manhattan's Parke-Bernet Galleries, where one blue chip found a dynamic investor willing to bid it up to a new record price. The buyer was California Collector-Industrialist Norton Simon, who paid $1,550,000 for Auguste Renoir's Le Pont des Arts, upsetting the previous auction record for impressionist paintings, set by the Metropolitan Museum when it paid $1,410,000 for Monet's The Terrace at Ste. Adresse a year ago.

The work Simon acquired was not an example of Renoir's mature style. Le Pont des Arts was painted around 1868, when the artist was only 27. Curiously, it was the sense of unfulfilled talent that most attracted Simon to this crisp, crystalline Paris cityscape.

"You can see in this young man," he says, "the influence of a composite of the work of other great artists from Canaletto to Boudin, but it has a flash of the genius that was to come in later years, and sometimes these early flashes of genius are the man's greatest." Be sides, he adds practically, "there has not been as great an impressionist painting available since World War II. The really great Renoirs are all in museums or foundations."

Cats and Dogs. Norton Simon made doubly sure that the prize would not escape him; five minutes before the sale began he had two long-distance telephone lines open from his Fullerton, Calif., office to Parke-Bernet. Then, as the bidding of Renoir's early master piece reached the million mark, he shifted from his representative, Manhattan Dealer Stephen Hahn, directly to Parke-Bernet's chairman, Peter Wilson, who relayed Simon's bids inconspicuously from behind a screen on the auction-room podium. "I had a hunch that it could have gone for as much as $2,500,000," said Simon afterward. He added: "I would not have paid that, but I would certainly have gone higher than I did."

What keeps the art market boiling is the knowledge that Renoir's Le Pont des Arts cost only $19,500 when its previous owner, Manhattan Collector Mrs. W. Clifford Klenk, bought it in 1941. The inevitable result has been to pull into the bull market a host of amateur speculators. To satisfy them, dealers are hustling out the "cats and dogs," in Wall Street parlance: stocks with a glamorous look but shaky prospects.

At Parke-Bernet's auction, other paintings of value brought high prices: a Pissarro went for a record $260,000, a 1906 Picasso for $430,000, believed to be a record for the Rose Period. A fauve-period Dufy, Les Trois Ombrellas, was bought by Houston's John Beck for $140,000, double the auction high set for a Dufy only three years ago. But dreary works by Vlaminck, Van Dongen and lesser artists were also bid skyhigh. Still, some paintings failed to meet their reserve price (at which the owner prefers to keep possession rather than sell). Claude Monet's loving yet sharp-focused portrait of his wife, Madame Camille Monet, was pegged at $800,000. When bidding stopped at $500,000, the portrait was automatically withdrawn. Said Parke-Bernet's Peter Wilson: "There are surprises in every sale." He had little to regret; the two-day auction of 79 impressionist paintings had brought an alltime record of $6,028,250.

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