Art Sales: New York modern art sales are ahead of last year's Last week's sales of Impressionists and Modern art in New York have been reported as lacklustre because nearly 30 per cent of 700 plus lots did not sell and the total did not meet the pre-sale estimate. Yet, $448 million (£282 million) changed hands, which is more than in the equivalent sales held last November or the previous spring. Those sales also had similar unsold percentages and did not meet their targets, so perhaps this is a pattern in which sellers are simply demanding prices which buyers are not always willing to meet. That was a challenge for the auctioneers last week, but they can walk away with a number of positive features to dwell on. There was, for instance, a healthy level of demand for Impressionist paintings. A classic painting of water lilies by Monet, owned by the same collector for 33 years and never at auction before, sold to an American collector within estimate for $44 million (£27.6million) - inch for inch the same price as the larger, record £41million of water lilies sold in 2008. A ravishingly atmospheric earlier Monet of wheat fields (pictured) was being sold by the Cleveland Museum of Art and almost doubled estimates selling to a European collector for $12million. It was significant also that London dealer Ivor Braka, who has spotted that lower-level Impressionists may be undervalued compared to modern and contemporary artists, snapped up significant paintings by Gustave Caillebotte and Camille Pissarro in the £2.5 million to £5million range. London's Richard Green gallery picked a sumptuous Renoir flower painting from the Cleveland Museum and secured it for $1.1 million. The modern sector of these sales always relies heavily on Picasso. Last week, there were 43 works, and 32 sold for $106million - nearly 25 per cent of the week's total. A sculpture of a cockerel and a painting of a tomato plant didn't warrant their $10million estimates, so didn't sell. But otherwise, his market was robust. The two top sellers were portraits of his lover, Marie-Therese Walter, and were pursued by the Picasso dealer David Nahmad, before selling to anonymous buyers within estimates. The more expensive, owned by Las Vegas hotelier Steve Wynn, sold for $41.5million, $13million more than it fetched 13 years ago. Le Viol, a graphically explicit drawing, attracted multiple bidders before selling for a double estimate $13.5million. For China-watchers, it was interesting to see that the winning telephone bid for Picasso's luridly coloured Buste de Femme was taken, at $13million, by Chi Fen Tsang, a specialist in Chinese ceramics based in Hong Kong. It was difficult to assess Russian involvement, but certainly the record-breaking Kandinsky, a vividly coloured 1909 composition that presages the artist's radical move into abstraction which sold for $23million, was bought for a client by Christie's managing director in Russia. The sculpture sections of the sales were marked by an abundance of Henry Moores. Inevitably, some fell by the wayside. Of the 31 sculptures and drawings of varying quality, 26 were sold. The largest, a seven and a half foot Two Piece Reclining Figure, sold near the top estimate for $4.7 million to the Gagosian gallery, a new player in the Moore market, which is exhibiting large-scale Moores in its galleries in London and New York. Of the smaller works, top price was for a 17in Family Group, last sold in 1996 for $685,000, which sold to New York dealer Maxwell Davidson for $2.6million. The strongest suit of the sales was the bullish market for radical Dadaist art from the early 20th century. A collage for a perfume bottle label by Marcel Duchamp soared over estimates to sell for $2.4 million; a rare early watercolour from 1919 by Berliner Hannah Hoch, better known for her photomontages, pulverised its $15,000 estimate to sell for $385,250; and a group of tiny collages made from discarded printed fragments in the 1920s, 30s and 40s by Kurt Schwitters, estimated collectively at $210,000, sold for $640,000. So, there was plenty of incident and energy in these sales, and behind the scenes afterwards with offers for many of those unsold lots.