Oct. 19 (Bloomberg) -- London’s art and design fairs closed last night with many dealers upbeat after achieving more sales than last year, even though buyers were taking their time and pressing for discounts.

The browsers included Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich and artist Yoko Ono, said dealers. While collectors passed on a $9 million Francis Bacon painting and Picasso’s 1950 “Portrait of Sylvette” priced at 4 million pounds ($6.5 million), works by Ed Ruscha, David Hammons and Neo Rauch priced at $1 million or more had found buyers.

“The winds are changing,” said David Fierman, director of the New York-based Salon 94, which sold an installation priced at $1.5 million at the Frieze Art Fair to the Greek food magnate Dimitris Daskalopoulos. “This year’s Frieze demonstrated that people still want to buy art. They seem to be after unique works, and things have to be priced right,” said Fierman.

Any sign of recovery follows a decline in demand for contemporary art following the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in September 2008. Sales slumped at Frieze the following month, said some dealers. Volumes of auction sales shrank between 70 percent and 80 percent, and prices of some artists more than halved, said the London-based research company ArtTactic in an e-mail last month. Twenty-eight galleries dropped out of Frieze. Other satellite events in the biggest week of London’s art calendar either shrank or closed.

Seventh Frieze

Frieze is Europe’s biggest commercial event devoted to works by living artists and held in a 70,000-square-foot temporary structure in Regent’s Park. The seventh annual edition of Frieze came as U.S. stocks advanced for a second week, lifting the Dow Jones Industrial Average above 10,000 for the first time in more than a year.

The 1995 installation, “Flight Fantasy,” by African- American artist Hammons, took up an entire wall of Salon 94’s booth at Frieze. It featured gold patterns on a red paper background embellished with wire and tiny balls of human hair.

“The timing couldn’t have been worse last year,” said Jeffrey Peabody, director of the New York-based Matthew Marks Gallery. “There’s been a distinct difference. Things have turned around. People are much more confident.” All five of an editioned 3-foot-high bronze female figure, “Fascia II,” by the U.K. sculptor Rebecca Warren sold for prices between $100,000 and $150,000, he said.

Enticing Collectors

Museum shows devoted to Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari and Anish Kapoor during Frieze Week had enticed international collectors to London, said dealers.

Ruscha’s 2009 “mountain” painting “A Riot of Atoms” was an early sale at Gagosian Gallery, director Pilar Ordovas said. The painting, measuring 6-feet-wide, was priced at $1.5 million, she said. “There was a lot of interest,” said Ordovas. “We sold five or six works in the first few hours.”

“Harmlos,” an 8-foot-high canvas from 2002 by the Leipzig School painter Neo Rauch, sold on the stand of New York-based dealer David Zwirner. The asking price was $1 million.

“We did well the first day, then it tapered off, though we sold each day,” said Julia Joern, director at David Zwirner, in an e-mail. “The overall impression was that people were taking their time.”

On Oct. 16, Christie’s International achieved an auction record of 892,450 pounds for Rauch’s 1999 painting, “Stellwerk” (Signal Box).

Hirst’s Knives

Sale talks were continuing for Damien Hirst’s 2008 stainless-steel cabinet “Night of the Long Knives,” priced at 2.5 million pounds with White Cube; Paul McCarthy’s 2004 sculpture, “Henry Moore Bound to Fail (Bronze),” at $2.5 million with Hauser & Wirth; and Jim Hodges’s installation “the dark gate” at $750,000 with Stephen Friedman, said the galleries, all of which have spaces in London.

This year’s Frieze contained 165 galleries from 30 countries. Numbers were bolstered by a new section, “Frame,” comprising single-artist presentations from 29 galleries less than six years old. Among these was the east London gallery Seventeen, which exhibited the U.K. artist Susan Collis’s “trompe-l’oeil” urban debris sculptures made out of precious materials. All nine pieces on the booth sold, ranging in price from 6,000 pounds to 35,000 pounds. Five sold to New York-based collectors, said gallery associate director Paul Pieroni.

“People are committing again,” said Pieroni. “It seems the awareness is higher. Collectors do their research before coming on the booth now.”

Koons Inspired

Seoul-based dealers Kukje Gallery also had success with younger artists at this year’s Frieze, selling 20 works by Korean artists under 50. All three of Gimhongsok’s Jeff Koons- inspired, large editioned sculpture of a puppy made out of trash bags cast in resin sold for $50,000 each, said gallery director Randy Moore.

“Collectors were holding back before,” said Moore. “People are now more positive, more relaxed.”

The other main draw for collectors during Frieze Week was the Pavilion of Art & Design London. The fair, held in a temporary structure in Berkeley Square, was the successor to DesignArt London, which had suffered after demand for furniture by designers such as Ron Arad and Zaha Hadid declined during the crisis.

The event had been bolstered by galleries showing modern and contemporary art, such as Faggionato Fine Art, Galerie Vedovi of Brussels and Van de Weghe Fine Art of New York (who shared a booth), and Ben Brown Fine Arts. Brown sold a red 1960 Lucio Fontana “Concetto spaziale” painting with three cuts, priced at 995,000 euros to a European collector. He was not prepared to divulge the final amount paid for the 3-foot-wide canvas.

Hedge Funds

“People have got bored pretending the world is coming to an end,” he said.

Proximity to the offices of many of London’s hedge funds, as well as hotels such as Claridge’s, helped attract wealthy visitors such as Ono and Prince Pavlos of Greece, said exhibiting dealers.

“I must have seen a million pounds of handbags,” said London-based modern design dealer Gordon Watson, who said he made many sales of pieces priced at less than 50,000 pounds. “There’s a whole new spectrum of buyers here.”

There were, however, no immediate takers for the $9 million Bacon and a 4-million-pound Picasso on the booths of Faggionato Fine Art and the Lefevre Gallery.

“People are looking for bargains,” said the Brussels- based dealer Paolo Vedovi, who was in negotiations with at least two potential buyers for a 1956 Alexander Calder mobile, priced at $720,000. “They want to do the same as an auction. But instead of the price going up, it goes down.”

(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: October 19, 2009 06:55 EDT