Art: Winter Auction

As fickle as what Wall Street calls “cat-&-dog stocks” are the hothouse prices of modernist paintings. Swank gallery connections, smartchart plugging, the humors of art critics and socialite fads too often puff them out of line with real values. Last week for the first time since 1927 works by such debatable modernists as Amédé Modigliani, Marie Laurencin, Pablo Picasso, Jules Pascin and Maurice Utrillo were opened to the rude winter blast of a public auction in Manhattan’s Rains Auction Rooms. Before a hard-boiled dealer and socialite crowd, one of Modigliani’s tuberculous women sold for the evening’s top price, $3,300; another for $650. A pale, pink Pascin girl brought $800; a smudge-eyed Laurencin woman, $550; a Picasso abstraction in water color, $230; a Utrillo, $550.

Dealers publicly moaned that the prices were only one-third of what they ought to be, but privately were thoroughly satisfied with this open-market test of their fair-weather commodity.