Peter Doig’s oil “Night Playground” (1997-98).

Summer season of evening contemporary art auctions ended here at Christie’s on Tuesday night when collectors went bargain hunting, feeling comfortable dropping $2 million, but thinking hard when the numbers started rising according to the New York Times.

Bidding was thin at the sale, which consisted of commercially appealing art by popular, time-tested names. The 40 works brought $31.7 million, in the middle of the estimate of $28.6 million to $40.9 million. Five works failed to sell.

Three paintings, including canvases by Gerhard Richter and Richard Prince, vied for the title of top seller. The winner was a work by the Scottish artist Peter Doig, who has fetched solid prices here recently. On Tuesday “Night Playground,” his densely painted landscape from 1997-98 being sold by Joel Mallin, a New York collector, went for $5 million, well above its high estimate of $3 million. Five bidders competed for the work, which went to a telephone buyer. (Last week Sotheby’s sold “Almost Grown,” a Doig canvas from 2000, for $3.3 million.)

A true (and sometimes terrifying) original, Ms. Bourgeois, now 96, is more than the sum of her parts. The uncommonly elegant and evocative portrait “Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine” reveals much about this haunting and haunted master while leaving intact what Georges Braque once wrote was the only thing that mattered in art: the thing you cannot explain.

At Ms. Bourgeois’s Brooklyn studio, the filmmakers Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach attend to her rambling, entrancing ruminations on the archetype of “the runaway girl”; the necessity of silence; and the power of fear and the primacy of memory in her work — of the mangled bodies of World War I veterans, of her mother twisting fabrics in a stream, of abandonment, of dreams.

The Pushkin Museum is Moscow's leading collection of Western European art, and owns about 650,000 items. It attracts about 1 million visitors a year, and has one of the finest collections of French Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings, with major works by Matisse, Monet, Picasso, and Van Gogh.

The museum has the backing of the Foundation for Support of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, a private organization headed by Dmitry Medvedev until he became President of Russia in May.

``President Medvedev has been deeply involved in getting this support, for which we are very grateful,'' Irina Antonova, the museum's director, said in an interview. The money, given over three years, ``will help us expand and reconstruct the museum as part of plans to mark our centenary in 2012.''

In November, the museum approved plans by U.K. architect Norman Foster to add 110,000 square meters (1.2 million square feet) to the museum's current 40,000 square meters. The Pushkin aims to mark its centenary in 2012 with four new buildings on adjacent land within sight of the Kremlin, and the renovation of several decrepit czarist-era structures.

Artist Damien Hirst (left) has bought a Jeff Koons.

This may be linked to Hirst's reformed attitude to drinking. The car is filled with a fifth of bourbon, but sealed. "You can drink the bourbon," said Koons in a 1992 statement, "but if you break the seal you destroy the soul of the piece."

The three paintings by Bacon sold in New York last week totalled $119 million, making him the highest-grossing artist of the week, outstripping Andy Warhol, who came in second with $110 million for 56 works.

• Do New Yorkers have something against Banksy? At Sotheby's last week, there were cheers when the British graffiti artist's painting Sale Ends Today, estimated to fetch $600,000, failed to sell.

• A former cartoonist and graphic designer for film directors Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg had a spirited opening of his latest paintings at the Catto Gallery in north London on Sunday.

advertisementAlain Bertrand has made a series of photorealist paintings of jazz musicians and Fifties American cars. Thirteen of the paintings were swiftly sold for prices of up to £20,000 each, and several commissions were received from proud owners of vintage automobiles.

• The three Ds (death, debt and divorce) have always been important factors in the supply chain for auctions, and this week come into the spotlight when Sotheby's offers one of Edward Hicks's many versions of his American folk-art icon, The Peaceable Kingdom, with an estimate of $6 million to $8 million.

The painting belongs to beleaguered jeweller Ralph O Esmerian, who used art and jewellery as collateral to buy a jewellery business in 2005. He now reportedly owes Sotheby's $11.5 million and Christie's $7.5 million.

There, the story behind Africa's finest piece of Futurist architecture goes hazy.

In one version, Pettazzi stood defiantly on one of his 18-metre (59 ft) concrete "wings" -- used as decorative shades for cars entering the garage -- and threatened to kill himself should the structure collapse as wooden supports were pulled away.

In another, the excitable architect held the gun to the head of a disbelieving builder, who had hesitated to pull away the struts for fear the long slabs would tumble down.

Either way, the wings stayed up, nobody was shot, and Pettazzi's design skills were vindicated.

Seven decades on, this extraordinary piece of Italian Art Deco, which resembles a plane at takeoff, is still standing in Asmara, the central capital of this former Italian colony.

The "Fiat Tagliero", named for the car firm and the old gas station's owner, is one of 400 buildings that make the remote Eritrean capital one of the world's most fascinating centres for Art Deco and other architectural styles.

One of a tiny number of books on the subject -- "Africa's Secret Modernist City" by three Asmara-based writers -- calls Asmara "the Miami of Africa" in reference to the U.S. city's fame for Art Deco, a design in the Modernism trend known for stylish geometric shapes, bold curves and soft colours.

"The Italians felt they would be here for hundreds of years, so they built and built, and left us this remarkable legacy," said Samson Haile Theophilos, who has written about Eritrean architecture, as he purred lovingly over the Fiat building.

"But I want to stress the workers, skilled and unskilled, were all Eritrean, so we consider this architecture ours."

Asmara's Art Deco boom came during 1935-41, the last six years of Italian colonial rule of the vast Horn of Africa region then known as Abyssinia.

Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich bought two paintings that were sold at record-breaking auctions last week, according to reports.

Lucian Freud's Benefits Supervisor Sleeping sold for £17.2m on Tuesday, followed by Francis Bacon's Triptych, which fetched £43m just 24 hours later.

The Art Newspaper quoted sources saying the London-based Russian billionaire was the buyer of both paintings.

A spokesman for Mr Abramovich declined to comment.

Rauschenberg - described as a "titan" of American art by the New York Times - died on Tuesday, Jennifer Joy, of the Pace Wildenstein gallery, in New York, said. He had been ill for some time.

The artist was born in Port Arthur, Texas, in 1925, and spearheaded a style called the Combines in the 1950s.

The style incorporated aspects of painting and sculpture, and Rauschenberg eventually moved on to include objects such as a stuffed eagle or goat and street signs. He became one of the most influential artists reacting against abstract expressionism.

In the 1960s, he responded to the work of his pop art contemporaries - including Andy Warhol - by incorporating up to the minute photographed images in his works, including pictures of John F Kennedy.

Rauschenberg began silk-screen painting and embarked on a period of more collaborative projects including performance art, choreography, set design and art and technology combinations.

Among his most famous works was Bed, created after he woke up in the mood to paint but had no money for a canvas. His solution was to take the quilt off his bed and use paint, toothpaste and fingernail polish.

In 1970, he established a permanent studio on Captiva island, off Florida's Gulf coast, where he made his home.

He demonstrated the diversity of his work when he won a Grammy Award in 1984 for best album package for the Talking Heads album Speaking in Tongues.

"I'm curious," he said in 1997, in one of the few interviews he granted in his later years. "It's very rewarding. I'm still discovering things every day."

The British painter's 1995 portrait of a nude woman sleeping on a sofa, "Benefits Supervisor Sleeping," sold for just under its high presale estimate of $35 million.

The previous record of $23.6 million was set last November for a Jeff Koons sculpture, "Hanging Heart."

Contemporary art sold strongly, defying erratic financial markets at a $350 million auction marked by a surprising preponderance of American buying.

Records fell for seven other artists as well.

"It was stupendous," said Christie's contemporary and postwar art international co-head Amy Cappellazzo, noting it was Christie's second-best contemporary result.

The sale's total was just above the midrange of its presale estimate.

"So much for the weak dollar," Cappellazzo quipped after the auction. U.S. buyers snapped up 70 percent of the $348,263,600 worth of art sold, while Europeans bought nearly all the rest.

"We didn't expect the dominance of Americans in this sale," added contemporary art co-head Brett Gorvy. A week ago, U.S. buyers accounted for less than a third of the auction house's Impressionist and modern art total.

The solid results, in which 95 percent of the 57 lots on offer found buyers, brought palpable relief. Some auction officials had privately expressed fears the spring sales could mark the beginnings of a market downturn.

ROTHKO FETCHES $50 MILLION

Henri Matisse's Chapelle du Rosaire is "a work filled with exuberance and brilliant color," as described by international art lecturer Olivier Bernier.

Nice itself is full of art opportunities and just outside, in and around Vence (less than 10 miles from Nice), you can see the chapel as well as the medieval village of Saint-Paul de Vence (full of galleries) and a stunning collection of 20th-century art.

By the late 1930s, Matisse had moved to the south of France, attracted by the beautiful light and the villages. In 1941, Matisse was operated on for colon cancer. His nurse later became a nun, and when he went to see her in the late 1940s and asked her what she needed, she said, "a chapel."

Matisse became "passionately interested" in the Chapel of the Rosary project, says Bernier. He designed everything: the vestments, the crucifix, the altar, the roof. Because light and color were so important to him, he wanted to use them in a new way.

Even on the outside, you recognize Matisse's simple blue lines on the white building. Inside, the chapel is smaller than you might expect, but more breathtaking in its intensity -- all-white high walls. They reflect the two windows of stained glass of azure blue, turquoise green and lemon yellow.

When the sun is out, the colors of the windows reflect on the white walls. What photos cannot seem to capture is the intensity of the color. Art aficionados will see a familiar form in the windows: Matisse's tropical leaf, a favorite motif.

On the wall near the altar, which is set at an angle, there is a simple figure of St. Dominic. Other walls display the stations of the cross. The simplicity is stunning.

"Matisse spent his entire life taking away. Less is more," and this is proof positive, says Bernier.

In the rooms outside the chapel are renderings from Matisse's studies and ideas for the chapel -- with different colors and tones that are equally stunning.