Christie’s London sale of Impressionist and modern art totaled a disappointing $45.6 million.

Christie’s sale of Impressionist and modern art in London on Tuesday evening got off to a rollicking start—then it nosedived.

The first lot of the night, a work on paper by Egon Schiele, elicited spirited bidding, quickly passing its high estimate of £300,000 ($377,000). After a five-minute bidding war, it sold for a hammer price of £1.05 million ($1.32 million), or £1.27 million ($1.6 million) with fees. Shortly after the Schiele’s success, bidding on what was projected to be the sale’s third-biggest lot, Henri Matisse’s Le Collier D’ambre (1937), stalled at £4.2 million ($5.3 million)—short of its £5-million ($6.3 million) low estimate—and the painting failed to sell.

The evening’s star lot, Fernand Léger’s prismatic 1913 painting Femme dans un fauteuil, faired similarly. Bidding stalled at £19.5 million ($24.5 million), far from its on-request estimate of £25 million ($31.4 million), and it failed to sell, dealing a fatal blow to the auction’s bottom line.

Of the auction’s 34 lots, three were withdrawn before the sale and seven failed to sell, for a sell-through rate of 77%. Among the 24 lots that did sell, 11 went for hammer prices below or equal to their low pre-sale estimates. (Auction house estimates do not take fees into account, making hammer prices truer indicators of lots’ performances.) The grand total of the evening’s hammer prices was an anemic £30.6 million (about $38.5 million), or £36.4 million ($45.6 million) with fees. It stands as almost £100 million less than the same sale last year, which brought in £128.1 million ($168.3 million).

Top lots:

• Pablo Picasso’s large, green-hued painting Homme et femme nus (1968) fetched a hammer price of £10.8 million ($13.6 million), or £12.5 million ($15.7 million) with fees. That result was near the low end of its pre-sale estimate of £10 million to £15 million ($12.6 million–$18.9 million), but enough to make it the lackluster sale’s biggest lot by far.
• Yves Tanguy’s ominous dreamscape, L’Extinction des espèces II (1938), crept past its low estimate of £2.5 million ($3.1 million) to sell for a hammer price of £2.6 million ($3.3 million), or £3.1 million ($3.9 million) with fees. The price came up just short of setting a new auction record for Tanguy. His similarly gloomy painting Les derniers jours (1944) sold for £4 million ($7.5 million) at Christie’s back in February 2005.
• Paul Signac’s pointillist painting of Venetian boat traffic, Venise. Le Rédempteur (1908), fell short of its low-estimate of £2.2 million ($2.8 million), selling for a hammer price of £1.9 million ($2.4 million), or £2.3 million ($2.9 million) with fees.

There were not many bright spots in Tuesday’s sale at Christie’s, but in addition to the Schiele, another was the only work by a woman to go under the hammer. Hannah Höch’s surreal watercolor Er und sein Milieu (1919) sparked impassioned bidding, quickly pushing it past its high estimate of £350,000 ($440,000) to hammer down at £520,000 ($654,000), or £635,250 ($799,000) with fees. That result was more than double the price the work fetched when it last appeared at auction, in 2012 at Christie’s, and sold for $386,500.