Art: On the Block

"SOLD—$23,000."

Hardly an eyebrow lifted when in Manhattan last week a dust-filled, muscular, melodramatic painting was knocked down for that fancy price. The painting: A Dash for Timber, by Frederic Remington, No. 1 painter-illustrator of the old Wild West, fast friend of Teddy Roosevelt. Was $23,000 high?

It was. Yet cash is plentiful in the current U.S. art market—and pedigreed paintings are scarce. Average collectors may well be confused by recent auction prices. So may experts. (The jolt of the year was a Bellini from the Jules Bache collection. Bache had paid $160,000 for it; a dealer got it last month at auction for $5,500.)

During the war years no gilt-edged Old Masters of the Andrew Mellon-J. P. Morgan class have changed hands at auction. Recent sales: a Fra Lippo Lippi, $30,000; a Van Dyck, $10,000; a Tintoretto, $41,000; a Rembrandt, $11,500; a Velasquez, $15,500. But many a painting with a dazzling signature has fetched a four-figure price: a Rubens for $6,900; a Goya for $3,500; a Gainsborough at $6,000; an El Greco at $3,000.

Conservative 19th-Century art has been sensationally bullish. Auction examples: Millet's Paysanne Revenant du Puits, $30,000; Turner's Fishmarket, $15,500; Boldini's Ladies of the First Empire, $11,000; Rosa Bonheur's En Forét, $8,000; a Corot landscape, $20,000.

Modern masters are as stable as A. T. & T. Yet a war-plant worker can almost buy a Matisse on monthly payments. Some recorded sales of big-name moderns : a Van Gogh, $8,000; a Lautrec, $4,100; a Cézanne watercolor, $3,000; a Gauguin, $5,000; a Daumier, $5,500; a Picasso, $3,000.