It was a bad sign when Larry Gagosian didn't show up for Sotheby's November 7 sale of Impressionist and modern art and things only got worse from there. A stalwart Tobias Meyer, in a double-breasted suit so snug it could sub for crime-fitting attire (Batman came to mind), couldn't compensate for the lack of bidding in the room for the firm's aspiring blockbusters. Are we all done? It was a rhetorical question for which Meyer repeatedly needed no answer.

Sotheby's sale was proof that one less major bidder at an auction can make the difference between a record price and a buy-in (i.e., bombed to the point of not selling). So far the big bidders and buyers this season have been Franck Giraud and Phillipe Segalot, two former Christie's executives who went into business together six years ago. The leonine-maned Segalot is Francois Pinault's  primary art adviser. Shortly after Pinault's acquisition of Christie's in 1998, Segalot was appointed Christie's worldwide head of contemporary art while Giraud became international director of 19th and 20th century art.

Giraud, bidding for a client on his cell phone, was the underbidder (i.e., runner-up) of the record $33.6 million for Matisse's 1937 L'Odalisque, harmonie bleue at Christie's. At Sotheby's, Segalot persistently bid, at Giraud's nudging, on Egon Schiele's 1917 Self-Portrait with Checkered Shirt, against an unknown bidder whose silky coif rivaled John Edwards's. Segalot/Giraud ultimately won it for $11.4 million. The French duo also went on to win Picasso's enormous Tete de Femme (Dora Maar) sculpture for $29 million.

Among the major casualties of the night were Picasso's 1931 La Lampe (estimate: $25/35 million) and Van Gogh's 1890 The Fields (Wheat Fields) (estimate: $28/35 million). It can't help when the New York Times calls a work shopped around; not to mention a tough sell as was the case with Gauguin's 1892 Te Poipoi (Le Matin), which depicts a robust squatting Tahitian woman, apparently relieving herself, with her dress hiked up around her waist. The painting elicited only one phone bidder, Joseph Lau of Hong Kong, who paid $39 million (estimate: $40/60 million) for the work and requested that Sotheby's announce at the post-sale press conference that he was the buyer.

Gauguin's Te popoi (Le matin), 1892

In total, the Sotheby's sale achieved $269.7 million, nearly $100 million less than the sale's lowest expectation. Sotheby's Impressionist and modern co-chairman David Norman was loath to blame the results on the health of the market, chalking it up instead to over-aggressive estimates. "I am not at all ready to read the results as a correction of the market," Norman said at the press conference, from which Meyer was notably absent while newly minted Sotheby's exec Lisa Dennison wandered around looking stunning and stunned.

Van Gogh's The fields (Wheat Fields), 1890

Of the Van Gogh, for which the firm had offered a guarantee to the seller (meaning Sotheby's kind-a-sort-a already bought it), Norman remarked, "It's a great picture that we are prepared to own and be patient with."  In other words: anyone wanna buy a Van Gogh?

--Kelly Devine Thomas