Brad Pitt and Naomi Campbell were among the buyers at the VIP preview of Art Basel as dealers reduced prices and showed classic works in an attempt to inject life into the ailing market for modern and contemporary art.

Within the first hour of the Swiss art fair, the world’s largest, a diamond-encrusted sculpture by Takashi Murakami sold for $2 million. Actor Pitt bought a Neo Rauch painting priced at 680,000 euros ($956,000). Model Campbell joined purchasers, said New-York based dealer and collector Alberto Mugrabi.

The fair, with 300 international galleries and more than 2,500 artists, aims to attract wealthy visitors. Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich and U.S. art collectors Eli Broad, Donald and Mera Rubell and Howard Rachofsky were also spotted at the preview after it opened at 11 a.m. local time yesterday.

“There’s a mood of cautious optimism,” Jeffrey Poe, co- founder of the Los Angeles-based gallery Blum & Poe, said in an interview. “It’s back to quieter and more interesting days.”

U.S.-based billionaires Stephen A. Schwarzman, co-founder of Blackstone Group LP, and investor Wilbur Ross were also seen browsing.

Prices of contemporary art have declined after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings in September 2008. Christie’s International and Sotheby’s respective $93.7 million and $47 million totals at the May contemporary-art auctions in New York were 72 percent and 87 percent down on last year. The average auction price of contemporary art has fallen 76.2 percent since May 2008, the London-based company ArtTactic said after those sales.

Pepsi Diamond

The 6-foot (1.8-meter) Murakami sculpture, made in collaboration with the U.S. record producer and designer Pharrell Williams, was a new piece presented by the Paris and Miami dealer Emmanuel Perrotin. Titled “The Simple Things,” it featured a glass-fiber, steel and acrylic head of Murakami’s cartoon-inspired character “Mr. Dob” with diamond-encrusted consumer products such as a can of Pepsi, a cup cake, a sneaker and bottle of Johnsons baby oil in his mouth.

“It’s made with 26,000 diamonds and gems,” said Williams, who was standing next to the glass-encased sculpture and its watchful security guard. “I wanted people to see the value of simple things with some of the staples of American culture.”

The sculpture, which took two years to make, attracted interest from four collectors when the fair opened, Perrotin said: “In the end it was bought by two collectors, one from France, one from the U.S., who will share it. They both have houses in L.A.”

Moscow Chairman

Campbell was spotted making the rounds with Vladislav Doronin, chairman of Capital Group, a Moscow-based real-estate developer.

“They bought some stuff,” said Mugrabi, whose family has one of the largest Andy Warhol collections. He declined to say what purchases they made. “We advise them. We are very good friends with them. They were at the Gagosian booth.”

Doronin owns works by Richard Prince, Warhol, Damien Hirst and Jean-Michel Basquiat, according to Mugrabi.

This year’s Art Basel, which runs through June 14, had fewer works marked at more than $1 million than last year, said dealers.

At last year’s Art Basel, Blum & Poe sold a Murakami sculpture for $8 million. At this year’s fair, the highest- priced work Blum & Poe is exhibiting is a Yoshitomo Nara installation at $600,000. The most expensive of its sales in the early hours of the fair was Matt Johnson’s 5-foot-high wooden jigsaw sculpture, “Puzzleman,” inspired by Rodin’s “Thinker.” From an edition of three, the 2008 sculpture sold to a U.S. collector for $150,000.

Campbell’s Soup

Zurich-based Bruno Bischofberger AG is showing just one work: Warhol’s 30-foot-wide “Big Retrospective Painting,” incorporating silkscreens of some of the artist’s most familiar motifs such as Campbell’s soup cans, heads of Marilyn Monroe and electric chairs. It is priced at 80 million Swiss francs ($74 million). The 1979 work has been consigned for sale by an anonymous collector who bought it from Bischofberger in May 2006, gallery director, Tobias Mueller said.

“A year and a half ago, it would have been an even higher price,” Mueller said. “There’s nothing to compare it with. It’s a one-share company,” he said. At the time of writing, the painting was not on reserve.

Giacometti’s Bronzes

An exhibition of works by Alberto Giacometti currently running at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel inspired a number of exhibitors to show sculptures by the Swiss-born artist. Gagosian Gallery had three Giacometti bronzes in an inner sanctum of its booth. Prices were not available to journalists. Paris-based dealer Galerie Krugier & Cie had half a dozen bronzes on show, one of which -- showing a standing woman -- was for sale, priced at $7.2 million, said the gallery.

Madrid-based Galeria Elvira Gonzalez gave over its entire booth to half a dozen works from the 1960s and 1970s by the minimalist sculptor Donald Judd. By lunchtime, one of the sculptures, a 3-foot-wide purple lacquer wall piece dating from 1968, was sold for a price of “more than $1 million” to a European collector, said Isabel Mignoni, a director of the gallery. Some works were owned by the gallery, some consigned by collectors, Mignoni said.

A new 6-foot-high stainless steel sculpture, “Piggies” by Paul McCarthy, was another early seven-figure sale. It was bought by a European collector on the booth of the London- and Zurich-based dealers Hauser & Wirth. It was one of an edition of three and was priced at $1.5 million, said the gallery.

Dynamic Change

“The days of people running in and acting as if the fair is an auction are over,” Michael Findlay, a director of the New York-based Acquavella Galleries, said. “Then people thought that if a thing hadn’t sold by 2.40 p.m. on the first day there was something wrong with it. We’re back to the dynamic of 36 of the last 40 Basel fairs.”

“I have a positive feeling,” Christophe Wiesner, director of the Berlin-based Esther Schipper gallery, said in an interview. “The atmosphere is completely different from Art Basel/Miami Beach in December.”

In the opening hours of the fair, Schipper sold all seven of its vitrines filled with life-size replica mushroom specimens by the Belgian-born artist Carsten Holler. Prices ranged from 8,000 euros for a single mushroom to 65,000 euros for a three- tier vitrine with several specimens. They sold to several different collectors from Europe, Wiesner said. Holler, based in Cologne, created vertiginous corkscrew slides for the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in London in 2006.

London-based dealership White Cube sold 15 pieces in the early hours of the fair by artists that included Antony Gormley, Marc Quinn, Andreas Gursky, Gilbert & George and Raqib Shaw ranging in price from 100,000 pounds ($163,065) to 500,000 pounds, Neil Wenman, a director of the gallery, said in an interview.

“The mood is much more positive than we expected,” said Wenman. “There are a lot more Americans around than we thought we’d see.”