Art: Excelsior!

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While the rest of the economy suffers depressions, the art market soars. At an auction last week in Manhattan's Parke-Bernet Galleries, buyers spent $5,852,250 for 72 Impressionist and modern paintings, another $906,375 for 19th and 20th century sculpture. The biggest sale was Van Gogh's Le Cypres et I'Arbre en Fleurs, a sun-touched landscape he painted in the asylum at St. Remy in the last busy and desperate year of his life. It is a relatively small canvas (20¼ in. by 25½ in.), certainly not one of his most spectacular works. Yet an anonymous buyer paid $1.3 million for it, more than three times the previous record for a Van Gogh.

Every known Raphael or Bruegel has long since found a permanent home. But there is still a floating supply of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works that demonstrate the buyer's sound yet "modern" taste. As a result, there seems no way for such works to go but up. Even the $230,000 paid for a minor Matisse, Fete des Fleurs a Nice, more than doubled the artist's record price of $106,152, set only a year ago. For Impressionists, the trade's present rule of thumb is that what $1 would buy in 1893 would cost $1,000 today. Monet, anyone?