"A Wonderful Investment"

On the velvet block at Manhattan's Parke-Bernet auction gallery last week was a yellowish nude by Pierre Bonnard, and the bidding had already reached $99,000. There, for a moment, it stayed, until the auctioneer breezily pointed out that "it would be much nicer to be able to tell your friends that it cost $100,000." Minutes later, the painting went for $101,000 --$7,000 more than the Bonnard auction record of 1958.

The collection on sale belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Adolphe Juviler of New York and Palm Beach, who explained that they wanted to be freer to travel. Their treasures were a choice, if uneven, selection of modern paintings, sculpture and drawings, and it had both Parke-Bernet's main gallery (white tickets) and TV annex (pink tickets) jammed to overflowing. The bidding was brisk: a curt nod, a quick wave of a pencil, an almost imperceptible gesture with a finger--the secret semaphore of auctioneering--would send the bidding up anywhere from $100 to $5,000. When the auctioneer had exhausted every other trick in his bag of cajolery, he would invoke the ultimate persuader of the current art market: "It's a wonderful, wonderful investment!"

By evening's end the patrons--art lovers and investors alike--had bid a total of $1,098,775 for 39 works--a sizable sum even at Parke-Bernet, which is one of the world's three biggest art and rare books auction houses. Aside from the Bonnard, two other paintings broke records. A splendid, red-faced Valet de Chambre by Chaim Soutine brought $76,000, nearly four times Soutine's auction record of seven years ago. An even bigger leap in value: a pair of superbly winsome lovers by Marc Chagall for $77,500, whose auction price was about half that only last April.

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