After the recent drop in auction prices, artworks that were once out of reach for museums have suddenly become affordable again.

This fall the Museum of Modern Art was able to buy a sculpture by the Arte Povera artist Pino Pascali (1935-68) and a floor piece by the Minimalist sculptor Carl Andre for less than their auction estimates.

“One silver lining to the current economic crisis is that there are a lot of serious acquisitions to be made that would not have been possible a year ago,” said Ann Temkin, MoMA’s chief curator of painting and sculpture.

Mr. Pascali’s “Bridge,” a braided steel-wool sculpture from 1968 that had been heavily promoted by Christie’s, failed to sell at the auction house’s Italian sale in London on Oct. 20. Christie’s had estimated that it would bring $2.7 million to $3.7 million. Ms. Temkin said she had wanted the piece but did not have the green light from the museum’s acquisitions committee to bid for it.

So when she heard that it went unsold, she contacted Christie’s and was able to make a deal. (She declined to say what the museum paid for it.)

“It’s a very rare thing,” she said of the nearly 30-foot-long hanging hammocklike sculpture. Pascali “died at 33,” she noted, so he “had an unusually short career.” Until the acquisition MoMA had only one of his pieces, “Machine Gun,” a 1966 sculpture fashioned from reworked parts of a Fiat 500.

Ms. Temkin said “Bridge” was a quintessential example of the Arte Povera movement, in which artists embraced materials that seemed antithetical to art-making traditions. She said the piece, taken together with work by artists like Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman and Eva Hesse, told “a story of a pivotal moment in the late 1960s.”

“Equivalent V,” a 120-piece brick rectangular floor piece by Mr. Andre executed from 1966 to 1969, carried an estimate of $1.2 million to $1.6 million at Sotheby’s contemporary auction on Nov. 11 in New York. MoMA was the only bidder and walked away with the piece for $1 million.

Ms. Temkin said “Equivalent V” was especially significant because it was the artist’s first floor work. MoMA has another floor piece by Mr. Andre, “144 Lead Square,” made later in 1969.

Ms. Temkin said that while the museum was committed to pushing forward and acquiring 21st-century works, “we are keenly aware of catching up by bringing classics of contemporary art into the collection while there is still time.”

WASHINGTON AT YALE

The Yale University Art Gallery has also been shopping at auction recently, although it was not exactly snapping up bargains. This month it purchased a rare miniature of George Washington by the British-born painter Robert Field at Skinner in Boston for $303,000, more than 10 times its high estimate of $30,000.

Robin Jaffee Frank, a curator in the department of American paintings and sculpture at the Yale museum, said that while she could not discuss the price, “I can say that this work was invaluable to us.”

“It was worth every penny,” Ms. Frank said. “When I held it in my hands I was so astonished by how remarkably unfaded it was.”

This was an important acquisition for Yale because it reunites the portrait with another miniature portrait by Field, of Martha Washington. “Both are signed and dated 1801,” Ms. Frank said. “Martha commissioned them a year after George Washington died to commemorate his life.”

Martha Washington then gave the miniature to Sarah Stuart, the daughter of Martha’s step-daughter, Eleanor Calvert Custis Stuart. It has been passed down through the family ever since.

The American art galleries at Yale are closed for a renovation and expansion that is to be completed around 2011. Both miniatures will be included in the traveling exhibition “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness: American Art from the Yale University Art Gallery” when it makes its next stop, at the Seattle Art Museum in February.

BRONZED PERFORMERS

Live street performers often converge on Doris C. Freedman Plaza, at the entrance to Central Park on Fifth Avenue at 60th Street. Now three bronze sculptures that pay homage to this urban phenomenon can be seen alongside the real thing.

Created by the German multimedia artist Christian Jankowski, the three human-scale statues were inspired by street performers Mr. Jankowski saw in Barcelona. The group, called “Living Sculptures,” was shown last year in Barcelona, Berlin and London and will remain on view in New York through May 1.

“It will be interesting to see how people react to them,” said Rochelle Steiner, director of the Public Art Fund, a nonprofit organization that presents art around the city and organized the installation. “I first saw them in Barcelona and thought it was so smart as a project, because it gets us to think about monumentality.”

FLOOR IT, PICASSO

Indulging his passion for cars and unconventional art projects, the South African artist Robin Rhode created a painting on a football-field-size canvas last week, using a new BMW as a paintbrush. Hose pipes installed on the front and back tires were filled with paints of varying colors. Using a special remote-

control device, Mr. Rhode sprayed the paint onto the canvas by using the motion of the car. The filmmaker Jake Scott, a son of Ridley Scott, captured the entire process with 45 cameras he had installed in Downey Studios in Los Angeles.

The finished canvas will be shown along with the film from March 25 through April 8 in Vanderbilt Hall, the 12,000-square-foot space with pink marble floors and 48-foot ceilings just off the main concourse of Grand Central Terminal.

“As an artist I am always keen to collaborate with other disciplines like dance, music and now film,” Mr. Rhodes said in a telephone interview.

“I’m a pure car enthusiast,” he added. “But I also liked the idea of going through childlike actions to create a painting that is a way to engage with technology and design.”