Picasso's "Femmes Lisant" sold at Sotheby's for $21.4M

New York’s two-week spring auction blitz got off to a lackluster start last night at Sotheby’s, as a quarter of the artworks on offer during the Impressionist and Modern art sale failed to find buyers. The sale pulled in $170.5 million, towards the low end of a $159 million to $230 million pre-sale estimate. “This was not a memorable group of artworks,” said advisor Linda Silverman. “But given the lack of quality, they did O.K.”

Surrealist works sold well, but buyers generally rejected aggressive estimates, even for artists like Picasso and Gauguin.

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