Paintings by Francis Bacon and Mark Rothko went unsold at Christie’s International in London tonight as bidders rejected high-value works in the auction house’s first test of the contemporary-art market in 2009.

The two pictures, being sold separately, had been estimated by Christie’s to sell for a total of as much as 8.5 million pounds ($12.2 million). Both failed to attract a single bid. Art dealers said the sale showed collectors are nervous while the economic slump continues.

The sale raised a total of 8.4 million pounds with fees, against a presale low estimate of 14.5 million, based on hammer prices. For Christie’s, this the lowest total at a February auction of contemporary art in London since 2004.

“There were a lot of empty seats in the room,” Offer Waterman, a London-based dealer, said in an interview. “I was surprised by the number of failures. The material wasn’t as strong as last week and the mood was down.”

Bacon’s 1954 picture, “Man in Blue VI,” had been in the same private collection since 1971. It had been expected to sell for between 4 million pounds and 5 million pounds.

The 5-foot-high canvas has a large dark background and a small, blurred figure. It was one of seven paintings Bacon made of an unknown man with whom the artist had an affair while living in the Imperial Hotel, Henley-on-Thames, England. Unusually, the image was painted from life, rather than from photographs, as was Bacon’s normal practice, said Christie’s.

Six lots later, Rothko’s abstract, “Green, Blue, Green on Blue” failed to sell. The 3-foot 4-inch high work on paper laid down on canvas in 1968 had been expected to fetch between 2.5 million pounds and 3.5 million pounds, said the London-based auction house.