A Picasso portrait, Dora Maar With Cat, sold for $95.2 million at Sotheby’s last night, the second-highest price ever paid for a painting at auction. The Image of Maar, one of Picasso’s mistresses, was sold on the second night of the important spring auctions. Boy With a Pipe (1905) holds the record price for a Picasso. That painting sold for $104.2 million in May 2004. At Christie’s on Tuesday night, an all-star cast led by a van Gogh and two important Picasso paintings played to a standing-room-only crowd. Strong performances throughout the evening left little doubt that the Impressionist and modern art market is still growing. But there were often only two serious contenders for some of the priciest works. So it was when the auction’s undisputed star — “L’Arlésienne, Madame Ginoux,” an 1890 van Gogh portrait of the proprietress of the Café de la Gare in Arles, France, which van Gogh frequented until his suicide that year — came up for offer. Larry Gagosian, the Manhattan dealer, and an unidentified telephone bidder were both determined to buy Repose, a startling, almost demonic 1932 depiction of Picasso’s mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, being sold by Bernard Picasso, the artist’s grandson. Gagosian bought the painting for a client, he said, paying $34.7 million.CAROL VOGEL
