A Subdued Affair : The fall auction season finds Sotheby’s and Christie’s tightening belts in a depressed economy

After a decade of unprecedented growth, New York auction houses are gearing down--instead of up--for the traditional pinnacle of the fall season. Estimated prices are down, drop-dead masterpieces are notably absent and fewer works are offered for sale than in past seasons.

Christie’s and Sotheby’s semi-annual marathon of big-ticket sales begins on Tuesday night with an auction of blue-chip contemporary art and continues next week with Impressionist and modern works by renowned masters. As usual, art-world eyes will be on the New York salesrooms, but not for the usual reasons. Instead of watching records smashed by tens of millions of dollars, dealers, collectors, curators and museum directors will be straining to see how the art market weathers the big chill of a recessionary climate.

Mired in economic pessimism, deflated by perceptions that the wildly escalating art market of recent years has finally faced a correction, and stung by disastrous sales in the past few months, Sotheby’s and Christie’s seem to have set the stage for a season of lowered expectations.

Consider the numbers:

* The most expensive item listed in the November sales is Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s “La Tasse de Chocolat,” an Impressionist portrait of a young woman stirring a cup of hot chocolate, which Sotheby’s expects to sell for $15 million to $18 million. Christie’s top contender is a late Vincent van Gogh still life, “Vase With Cornflowers and Poppies,” valued at $12 million to $16 million. Those are fabulous sums to all but the world’s wealthiest collectors, but only six months ago, the two auction houses flaunted far more desirable, trademark examples of Renoir’s and Van Gogh’s work, valued at $40 million to $50 million apiece--and sold them for much more than those staggering estimates.

One night last May, Japanese paper manufacturer Ryoei Saito paid $82.5 million--a record for any work of art--for Van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr. Gachet,” a strikingly melancholy depiction of the homeopathic physician who treated the troubled artist. The next evening Saito snagged Renoir’s celebrated dance hall scene, “Au Moulin de la Galette,” for $78.1 million.

* The jewel of Sotheby’s round of Impressionist and modern auctions is a group of 36 works from the estate of Henry Ford II, to be sold on Nov. 12. The collection includes such pricey paintings as the Renoir portrait ($15 million to $18 million), Amedeo Modigliani’s “Portrait of Morgan Russell” ($8 million to $10 million) and Paul Cezanne’s landscape, “Le Jas de Bouffan” ($7 million to $9 million), but Ford sales are expected to total only about $50 million--less than the price of a single painting in some spectacular auctions.

* Of about 100 items offered in Sotheby’s Nov. 12-13 sales of Impressionist and modern art, 71 are from estates that must be liquidated this year, according to David Nash, senior vice president of Sotheby’s fine arts department. Sellers who can wait for a more auspicious time are doing so--both by choice and with the advice of auction house experts, Nash said.

* Big-ticket auctions in the last few years have often racked up records for a dozen or so artists in a single evening, but potential record-setters are rare among November’s top lots. The highest valued piece in upcoming contemporary sales, Willem de Kooning’s “July, 1956,” is estimated at $5 million to $7 million--far below the record $20.68 million bid in last November for De Kooning’s painting “Interchange.” The most expensive work by Jasper Johns offered this month is an untitled 1984 painting from a series based on the artist’s bathroom, valued at $2.5 million to $3 million--well below the record $17 million paid two years ago for a splashier, more archetypal example, “False Start.”

* Some upcoming auctions contain fewer items than they did last spring, pointing to the difficulty of enticing valuable but conservatively priced material into a bear market. Christie’s prime contemporary sale, on Wednesday night, consists of 59 lots, compared to 76 in the firm’s May sale, for example. The Park Avenue auction house included 81 works in its Impressionist and modern sale in May; this month’s comparable sale numbers only 47.

Is the outlook as grim as these figures indicate? Not according to auction house officials who say they have tailored conservative sales to fit a cautious market. “If we had accepted every picture that was offered, our Impressionist and modern sale would be four times as big as it is,” Nash said. “We were obliged to reject a considerable number of paintings because we felt the sellers’ expectations were too high for this market.” “You won’t find paintings with $10 million and $15 million estimates in our contemporary sale, and that is intentional on my part,” echoed Lucy Mitchell-Innes, head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s. “We don’t want paintings with a high risk factor.”

This year’s scale-back is carefully calculated to produce successful sales and the appearance of a stable market, albeit at a lower level. To that end, auction house officials have negotiated reduced reserve prices--the lowest that a seller will accept--and decreased estimates accordingly.

The result, they hope, will be “a return to a connoisseur’s market,” as Nash put it.

Mitchell-Innes concurred: “One thing we won’t see is speculative sellers or speculative buyers. We will see a real market of real collectors.”

Tracking the history of the art market’s recent boom, Nash said that auction prices began to rise sharply around 1983 and seemed “unstoppable” in 1988 and 1989, when they were fed by Japanese collectors, a rash of new money and speculation.

The downturn began last May. Although New York’s highly publicized, big-ticket auctions toted up unprecedented sums, record prices were offset by the fact that about a third of the artworks failed to sell. In subsequent months, Impressionist and modern auctions in London proved disastrous and other European auctions have done poorly.

In general, though, the Impressionist and modern art market--which is thoroughly international--is expected to be more stable than the predominantly American contemporary market.

“The United States seems determined to have a recession,” according to Nash, despite the fact that there are still many Americans for whom “the purchase of a $3-million or $4-million painting would not make a significant dent in their wealth.”

“Clearly, the market has changed from what it was a year ago. We don’t have our head in the sand about the economy,” he said. But he thinks the problem may have as much to do with attitudes as with actual economic conditions. “I’ve been through three or four recessions,” he said. “Each time people look back and say, ‘Why didn’t I have the money and the courage to buy that? It was so cheap.’ I predict that in three or four years, maybe even in a few months, the same thing will happen.”