Claude Monet’s Nymphéas.

A Monet water lilies painting sold for nearly €34.2 million while a Kandinsky fetched an artist’s record €18 million as Christie’s kicked off the auction season with a sale that saw many mid-level works failing to find buyers.

Nymphéas, one of Monet’s iconic water lilies from 1905, executed during his years at Giverny, had been estimated to sell for €23.4 million to €39 million, and just managed its middle range with a final price of €34,252,808, including commission.

Wassily Kandinsky’s Studie fur Improvisation 8, meanwhile, hit the low end of its €15.5 million to €23.4 million estimate, and set a new auction record for the Russian artist. The vibrant work was being sold by Switzerland’s Volkart Foundation.

Bidders tried to cut increments in half

But 30 per cent of the 69 works on offer failed to sell when bids failed to reach the reserve, the secret price at which a client has agreed to sell a work.

In all the auction took in a total of just under €160.5 million, missing the low pre-sale estimate of about €164.3 million (estimates do not include commission charges of about 12 per cent). The high estimate was about €246.5 million.

Christie’s nonetheless said it was pleased with the results.

“It was a very, very strong sale, with great results for top lots,” said Brooke Lampley, head of Impressionist and modern art.

Lampley also noted that the sale’s unusually high percentage of discretionary selling – when collectors decide to sell, versus estate sales that happen because the owner is deceased – was “very much a sign that collectors are feeling confident in the market. They are choosing to sell”. She said this was a testament to the increasing strength of art as an asset class.

But the atmosphere in the room was muted and for works that sold, bidding was steady but far from unbridled.

Bidders tried to cut increments in half from the next solicited bid and the salesroom was more than half empty before the sale ended.

Officials privately attributed the relatively high percentage of works that failed to sell – nearly one-third – chiefly to a single collection whose owner was unwilling to lower the reserve prices in the days leading up to the sale.

In all, six lots sold for more than €7.8 million each. Other highlights included Miró’s Peinture (Femme, Journal, Chien), which went for €10.76 million, and Picasso’s Buste de femme, and oil on canvas that at €10 million was one of the few works to beat its pre-sale estimate handily.

Two Giacometti sculptures, La Jambe and Tête sur tige, fetched €8.8 million and €5.3 million respectively.

Among casualties were a Picasso sculpture, Coq, estimated at €7.8 million to €11.7 million, and works by Chagall and Degas, the latter estimated to sell for as much as €7.8 million.