Price Isn’t Right for Contemporary Art : Auction: The first of a series of sales falls well below expectations at Christie’s. Only 40 of 67 works are sold, and 16 pieces fail to meet low-estimate figures.

This fall’s major series of contemporary art auctions got off to a shaky start on Tuesday night at Christie’s. Despite the cachet of 15 works from the esteemed collection of the late Burton and Emily Hall Tremaine, the sale fell far below the Park Avenue auction house’s expectations.

Only 40, or 60%, of the 67 works offered were sold, and 16 pieces brought less than their low pre-sale estimates. Christie’s had predicted sales of about $27 million to $36 million, but the evening’s total came to only $15.35 million.

The star attraction was Jasper Johns’ 1959 painting “Device Circle,” which incorporates the wooden slat that the artist used to inscribe a circle on a splashy field of primary colors. The painting was valued at $5 million to $7 million, but it was sold to an anonymous telephone bidder for $4.4 million.

“That’s not peanuts,” auctioneer Christopher Burge said after the sale, but it may have seemed so to some observers who had watched larger Johns paintings fetch as much as $17 million at auction three years earlier.

“The Johns brought a solid price in this market,” Burge said, placing the sale in the context of the highly volatile contemporary art market. New York dealer Leo Castelli, who sold “Device Circle” to the Tremaines in 1959, said he couldn’t recall the exact amount the industrialist and his wife paid for the painting but he knew it was less than $2,000.

As in last week’s Impressionist and modern art auctions, bidding indicated that collectors think estimates are still too high, but sales totals have increased 40% to 50% from last spring’s disastrous auctions.

“What we were seeing tonight was a market stepping up to pay what it was prepared to pay and not more,” Burge said on Tuesday. While admitting that “there was some trawling and bottom fishing going on,” he said the sale would provide a solid base for setting estimates at future auctions.

What the contemporary art market will bear appears to be determined on a collector-by-collector, artist-by-artist, work-by-work basis, making it difficult for auction houses and dealers to establish fair prices. The unidentified buyer of the Johns--bidding by telephone with paddle No. 1,724--also bought the second and fourth most expensive items in the sale. In each case, the buyer paid close to the low estimate for an item in the Tremaine collection: $2 million for Willem de Kooning’s “Villa Borghese,” a 1960 painting valued at $2.5 million to $3.5 million, and $935,000 for Alexander Calder’s “Bougainvillea,” a mobile sculpture estimated at $900,000 to $1.2 million.

The Richard Gray Gallery of Chicago paid $1.65 million, the auction’s third highest price, for Franz Kline’s 1959-1960 abstract painting, “Henry H II,” valued at $1.5 million to $2 million.

The Calder sale set a record for the artist. Record prices also were paid for works by Louise Bourgeois ($198,000 for an untitled painted wood sculpture from 1950) and Alexander Liberman ($66,000 for “Gyre,” a 1966 steel sculpture).

Relatively low-priced items sparked the most spirited competition. The six works that commanded prices above their high estimates were all in the five- to six-figure range, while $1 million-plus pieces by Mark Rothko, Frank Stella and Cy Twombly were not sold.

David Hockney’s “Fall Pool With Two Flat Blues (Paper Pool 28),” a pressed paper-pulp image of a swimming pool, soared above its high estimate of $250,000 and finally sold for $396,000 to an unidentified European. Another auction success, Gerhard Richter’s 1968 painting of snow-covered mountains, “Gebirge (Himalaja),” was sold for $385,000--more than twice its high estimate of $160,000.

Several Los Angeles dealers and collectors were part of the crowd that filled the sale room and spilled over into two adjacent galleries. Eli Broad bid $95,000 for Ed Ruscha’s 1983 painting, “Not a Bad World, Is It?” but it was sold for $132,000 by telephone.

Apparently bidding for record producer David Geffen, who accompanied him, New York dealer Larry Gagosian bought two small pieces from the Tremaine collection--a Roy Lichtenstein drawing for $28,600 and a black painting by Frank Stella for $143,000.

Fourteen of the 15 Tremaine works up for sale were sold on Tuesday night, for a total of$8.29 million. Christie’s sold an additional $18.78 million worth of modern art from the Tremaine collection last week. In an unusual move for the auction house, Christie’s guaranteed the Tremaine family an undisclosed sum to win the prestigious consignment.

Burge said the auction house could lose money on the deal. The company is still holding two works by Piet Mondrian and Joan Miro that went unsold last week. It will have to hold on to the paintings and try to sell them privately later unless the Tremaine family agrees to take them back and renegotiate the guarantee.

Christie’s officials expressed no regret over the deal, however. Offering the Tremaine collection boosted Christie’s image world-wide and encouraged other high-quality consignments, managing director Christopher M. Davidge said.

The crowd was expected to move to Sotheby’s on Wednesday night for a major contemporary art auction. Lower-priced works will be offered today at Sotheby’s in the final sale of the fall series.