June 24 (Bloomberg) -- A painting by Claude Monet and one by Pablo Picasso sold for 12.1 million pounds combined ($20 million) at Christie’s International in London last night as the auction market for Impressionist art contracted 74 percent.

Christie’s 44-lot sale tallied 37.1 million pounds with fees, just above the low estimate of 36.85 million pounds, based on hammer prices. The total was about a quarter of the equivalent event last year that contained a larger selection of 81 lots and fetched 144.4 million pounds, boosted by a record 40.9 million pounds for Monet’s 1919 “Le Bassin aux Nympheas.”

Now that auction houses have abandoned the practice of guaranteeing minimum prices to sellers, owners of some high- value works are reluctant to risk selling them, said dealers. Sellers know that saleroom demand has declined since Lehman Brothers Holdings filed for bankruptcy in September.

“The good things sold well and the market wasn’t fooled by things that shouldn’t have been there,” Ray Waterhouse, director of the London-based art advisers Fine Art Brokers, said in an interview.

It will still be some time before sellers are confident enough to offer valuable Impressionist works at auction, Waterhouse said. “By November the market could free up. We’re not quite there yet. It’s still a buyer’s time.”

Price Range

Thirty-two percent of the material was unsuccessful, mostly in the 300,000-pound to 600,000-pound estimate range, where seven out of the 21 lots failed to sell. Only two works in the price range managed to achieve a hammer result above their high estimates.

“We usually achieve a sale rate of 80 percent in the middle market,” Thomas Seydoux, Christie’s Paris-based co-head of the Impressionist art department said in an interview after the sale. “We need to fine tune our estimates.”

The lot with the highest estimate was the 1969 Picasso “musketeer” painting “Homme a l’epee,” expected to fetch between 5 million pounds and 7 million pounds. The 5-foot-4- inch-high canvas had been included in the artist’s 1970 exhibition in the Palais des Papes, Avignon.

The seller had bought the painting at Christie’s in 2005 for 2.7 million pounds. Four years on, it made a substantial profit, selling in the room to the New York- and London-based dealer Ezra Nahmad for 5.8 million pounds.

Sellers’ Profit

Monet’s 1878 landscape “Au Parc Monceau” was another painting that made its seller a profit. Last seen at auction in June 2001 at Sotheby’s London, where it sold for 3.7 million pounds, the 2-foot-high canvas sold at Christie’s to a telephone buyer for 6.3 million pounds, the highest price of the evening.

“Strong decorative paintings are holding up the market,” Seydoux said. “There are still billionaires who want to buy.”

Paintings by Joan Miro and Franz Marc were the evening’s other main successes. Miro’s 1949 canvas, “Peinture (Femme se poudrant),” one of a group of works known as “slow” paintings, was another Nahmad purchase at 4 million pounds. Estimated at 2.2 million pounds to 2.8 million pounds, this 18- inch-wide Surrealist painting, notable for its patches of white cement as well as its trademark plankton-like figures, had never been offered at auction before.

Marc’s 1910 canvas “Springende Pferde,” depicting horses leaping through a sunlit winter landscape, sold for a mid- estimate 3.7 million pounds to an anonymous bidder in the room. This work by the German Expressionist artist was also fresh to the auction market.

Soutine, Pissarro

Chaim Soutine’s 1917 “Autoportrait a la barbe,” which had been in the same private collection for the last 80 years, was one of a number of works in the 300,000-pound to 600,000-pound range that failed to sell.

“We are still in a transitional phase of the market,” said Seydoux. “We have to be cautious with estimates.”

Camille Pissarro’s 1903 Paris street scene, “Le Quai Malaquais, Printemps,” estimated at 900,000 pounds to 1.5 million pounds, was withdrawn from the sale.

The Impressionist painting had been stolen by the Gestapo from the family home of Gisela Bermann-Fischer in Vienna in 1938. Seventy years later, Bermann-Fischer, now 80 and living in Zurich, recovered the painting and entered it into Christie’s sale. It cost her at least 500,000 Swiss francs ($466,000), mainly in legal fees, to recover the painting, Bermann-Fischer said last month in an interview with Bloomberg News.

The painting had been withdrawn because of a dispute between Gisela Bermann-Fischer and another member of the family, according to Seydoux. “We’re hoping the dispute will be settled soon and we’ll be able to re-offer this restituted painting,” he said.

Eighty-three percent of the lots were bought by bidders from the U.K. and Europe, 14 percent from the U.S. and 3 percent from Asia.

(Scott Reyburn writes about the art market for Bloomberg News. Opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer on the story: Scott Reyburn in London at sreyburn@hotmail.com.

Last Updated: June 24, 2009 05:11 EDT