Nov. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Christie’s International had its smallest evening Impressionist and modern-art auction in New York since May 2004 as buyers snubbed Picasso and Matisse in favor of conservative 19th-century landscapes and still-lifes.

Last night’s sale totaled $65.7 million, below the $68.7 million-to-$97.2 million presale estimate. Nearly a third of the lots didn’t sell, as collectors and dealers chewed gum, furrowed their brows and sought signs of an elusive rebound in the art market. The tally was down 83 percent from two years ago.

“It’s not been a great sale, but the material was not fantastic,” said London dealer Guy Jennings. “There was some bidding, but it was not euphoric.”

The sale begins two weeks of auctions at Christie’s and publicly traded rival Sotheby’s that will test sentiment in New York’s art market a year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. triggered a Wall Street slump. The auction houses expect a total of as much as $607 million.

Last night, there were no bids for Pablo Picasso’s 1943 blood-red wartime “Tete de femme” (Head of Woman), which was the projected top lot and featured on the catalog’s back cover. At $7 million to $10 million, the estimate was too bold for today’s choosey buyers. Owned by the anonymous seller since 1999, it depicts Picasso’s muse Dora Maar, wearing a hat.

Competition peaked for two late-19th-century works. Edgar Degas’s circa-1896 pastel “Danseuses,” portraying a tutu-clad ballerina mid-stretch, sold for $10.7 million to an unnamed Asian buyer over the phone, besting the $9 million high estimate.

Sexy Bronze

New York dealer Christopher Eykyn paid $6.4 million for Auguste Rodin’s sexy bronze “Le Baiser,” cast around 1887- 1901, estimated for up to $2 million. Eykyn bid on behalf of a private collector he declined to name. The bronze depicts an adulterous kiss inspired by Dante’s “Inferno.”

Classic impressionist works priced under $3 million sold best, while most modern works -- including an Amedeo Modigliani, a Max Ernst, and a Piet Mondrian -- had pre-crash estimates and didn’t sell.

There was an appetite for the pretty -- large scaled, brightly hued and figurative paintings by second- and third-tier names such as Tamara De Lempicka and Kees van Dongen. Some demand came from Russia and nearby countries, said Thomas Seydoux, head of Christie’s Impressionist department. European buyers took advantage of a weaker dollar and swept up 42 percent of the lots. Americans bought 29 percent, Christie’s said.

Corot, Monet

Auctioneer Christopher Burge sold a potpourri of art classics by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Degas and Claude Monet to an assortment of phone bidders and paddle wavers. The 40 lots were half the number the privately held auctioneer offered a year ago in the thick of the global financial crisis.

In November 2007, Christie’s Impressionist and modern-art auction raised $396 million from 91 lots offered, including 10 that exceeded $12 million each. In the year-ago sale, four lots beat $10 million. Last night, only the Degas did.

A pair of artworks from the estate of New York financier Jack J. Dreyfus, of the Dreyfus mutual funds, had mixed results. Henri Matisse’s 1954 collage “Rosace,” designed as a memorial to art collector and MoMA co-founder Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, was estimated to sell for up to $4 million.

The geometric orange-and-green design wasn’t flashy or cheap enough for last night’s buyers and was unsold.

Kandinsky’s Swing

A white-ground 1929 Bauhaus-era Wassily Kandinsky “Winkelschwung” (Angular Swing) sold for $2.7 million to an anonymous European collector. Dreyfus died in March 2009.

Estimates do not include commissions, which are 25 percent on the first $50,000, 20 percent between $50,000 and $1 million, and 12 percent above $1 million.

Dealers blamed the dearth of top-quality works for the weaker sale.

“People aren’t that motivated to sell,” said Paul Gray of Chicago’s Richard Gray Gallery. “They’re confident that there are better times ahead.”

Sotheby’s Impressionist and modern sale is tonight.

Paris Art Fair

In another sign of the hesitant demand for modern art, none of the museum-quality 20th-century works shown by dealers in a special exhibition at last month’s Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain, or FIAC, in Paris has so far found a confirmed buyer.

“Things are still on hold,” Eleonore Malingue, director of the Paris-based gallery Malingue, which originally proposed the show, said in a telephone interview. “Private sales take time. People don’t rush into buying a $30 million painting.”

“The Modern Project” contained 24 works by Picasso, Mondrian, Bacon, Warhol and other artists on consignment from private collections. A 1934 Picasso painting of his mistress Marie-Therese Walter priced at $24 million and a Mondrian abstract valued between $30 million and $40 million both attracted reserves at the VIP preview in the Grand Palais on Oct. 21.

New York-based dealers Richard Gray Gallery and PaceWildenstein, which were offering the Picasso and Mondrian, respectively, didn’t respond to e-mails asking if the paintings have been sold.

Seven of the galleries will be showing in a section called “Special Exhibition” at the Abu Dhabi Art fair, opening on Nov. 19, said Malingue.

“Some pieces of art are the same as in FIAC,” she said. “Some are new.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Lindsay Pollock in New York at lindsaypollock@yahoo.com; Philip Boroff in New York at pboroff@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: November 4, 2009 10:57 EST