Picasso Stars in Sotheby's Auction, With 5 of Top 10 Sales It took less than five minutes for a 1932 portrait that Picasso painted in just two and a half hours to sell for $41.5 million at Sotheby's on Thursday night. It was the second evening of the important Impressionist and modern art auctions, and there were many bumpy patches, as there had been at Christie's the night before. Still, auction officials said that given the uncertainty of the financial markets and the aftermath of the elections, it could have been a lot worse. "People are price-conscious but the market is definitely functioning," a relieved Simon Shaw, head of Sotheby's Impressionist and modern art department, said after the sale. It has been a tough week for Sotheby's and its archrival, Christie's. Both auction houses had padded their sales with mediocre material, and buyers knew it. On both nights, second-tier examples of artists including Cézanne, Matisse, Monet and Picasso went unsold. Christie's auction on Wednesday night had been a struggle, but in the end it had more high-priced works and its total, $204.8 million, was higher than Sotheby's, which brought $163 million on Thursday. Both were below their estimates. Coming second - in this case 24 hours after Christie's auction - generally has its advantages. Sotheby's had the time to analyze the results of Wednesday's sale and called sellers, often hoping to persuade them to lower their expectations (and the reserve prices - the secret minimum prices agreed upon by the sellers and the auction house). That made the sale feel far more buoyant, even though the results were strikingly similar. At Sotheby's, 46 of its 67 works sold, or 69 percent; at Christie's, 48 of the 69 artworks on offer, or 70 percent, sold. At Sotheby's on Thursday, the Picasso portrait, "Still Life with Tulips," which had been estimated to sell for $35 million to $50 million, brought $41.5 million from an unidentified telephone buyer, one of three people who bid on the painting. The canvas, which depicts the artist's mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter posed like a statue on a plinth, had last been up for sale at Christie's in May 2000, when it brought $28.6 million. François Pinault, Christie's owner, is said to have been the buyer and to have sold the piece to Stephen A. Wynn, the Las Vegas casino owner, who had consigned the canvas to Sotheby's on Thursday night. What made it unusual was that this was not simply a portrait but a still life of tulips, too, and on the back Picasso had recorded the date as well as the hours he painted it: 9 to 11:30 p.m. (Final prices include the buyer's commission to Sotheby's: 25 percent of the first $50,000; 20 percent of the next $50,000 to $1 million and 12 percent of the rest. Picasso was the undisputed star of the evening. Of the top 10 sellers, 5 were by the Spanish master. Another portrait of Walter, "Femme à la Fenêtre (Marie-Thérèse) " from 1936, that was expected to fetch $15 million to $20 million, sold to an unidentified buyer for $17.2 million. A drawing by Picasso was also one of the night's most coveted objects. "Le Viol," or "The Rape," from 1940, an intricate pen, brush and ink scene, was sold from the estate of George Embiricos, the legendary collector and Greek shipping magnate who died last year. The beauty of the draftsmanship and its provenance together helped push the price. While its estimate was $4 million to $6 million, a determined telephone bidder ended up paying $13.5 million for the drawing. A 1967 painting by Picasso, "Mousquetaire au Chapeau, Buste," a canvas of a musketeer, brought $4.3 million. It was sold by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington. After a show of these later canvases was on view at the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea in 2009, their popularity has soared. One of the evening's few Impressionist paintings, "Champ de Blé," an 1881 Monet landscape belonging to the Cleveland Museum of Art, was a hot seller. Estimated to bring $5 million to $7 million, the sun-dappled canvas went to a telephone bidder for $12.1 million. "Belle Halein, Eau de Voilette," a photograph by Man Ray of Marcel Duchamp wearing a wig, dressed as a woman and portrayed as though he were the image for a perfume bottle label - an emblem of Dadaist fun - was a coveted work. Created in 1921, it sold to Gabriel Catone, a New York art adviser, for $2.4 million, well above its $1.7 million high estimate. After the sale, dealers, fearing another poor night, were encouraged by the results. "In this market, quality prevails," said the New York dealer Christophe Van der Weghe. The price has to be right, too.