A slimmed down and tightly edited contemporary evening sale at Sotheby’s, top-loaded with material fresh to the market, produced crackling results and few casualties Thursday night.

Miming in part the carefully choreographed performance of the house’s Impressionist and modern sale on Wednesday evening, where all but four lots sold, 37 of the 40 contemporary lots offered fetched a total of £25,549,450 ($41,911,318), for a sizzling sell-through rate of 92.5 percent by lot and 97.2 percent by value. Six works sold for over a million pounds and 11 hurdled the one million dollar mark.

By geographic breakdown, European buyers dominated with 57 percent by lot, followed by the U.S. at 24 percent and Asia at 19 percent.

Still, the result pales in comparison with the £94,701,550 earned at the equivalent sale last summer, illustrating how far this market still has to travel before seeing any kind of serious recovery.

Even so, one artist record was set when Ethiopian-American artist Julie Mehretu’s ink and acrylic on canvas abstraction from 2005, Untitled (Dervish), made £241,250 (est. £200–300,000). Mehretu was one of the few 40-and-under artists included in the sale, which was dominated by blue-chip, museum-minted artists, 11 of whom are no longer with us. In all, 19 of 37 lots went to non-living artists.

That conservative bent proved a winner, as Nicolas de Staël’s Nature Morte à la Carafe (1953) sold for £870,050 (est. £500–700,000). The work last appeared at auction in May 1970 at Parke-Bernet in New York, a predecessor of Sotheby’s America, where it made $72,000.

Adding to the feeling of a kind of Golden Oldies affair was Alexander Calder’s rare wood, string, rod, and wire standing mobile, A Cinq Morceaux de Bois (1934), which attracted a pack of at least five bidders, finally selling to London dealership Theobald Jennings for £2,617,250 (est. £1.2–1.8 million). Underbidders included Iwan Wirth of London and Zurich’s Hauser & Wirth, as well as the Nahmads.

“My client was delighted to get it,” said Simon Theobald, moments after the sale. “It’s a beautiful, rare, and early work, and we were very pleased with the price we paid for it.”

A sister stabile from the same period, Ebony Sticks in Semi-Circle, fetched $3,498,500 at Sotheby’s contemporary sale in New York in May.

A second Calder in tonight’s sale, Untitled, a painted black hanging mobile from 1956, fetched £1,833,250 (est. £1.2–1.8 million). But the earlier Calder trailed the evening’s top lot, Andy Warhol’s prime, silver paint, and silkscreen ink on canvas Mrs. McCarthy and Mrs. Brown (Tunafish Disaster) (1963), which sold to a telephone bidder for £3,737,250 (est. £3.5–4.5 million). It last sold at auction at Sotheby’s London in June 1995 for £290,000. Dealers Larry Gagosian and Alberto Mugrabi, bidding in tandem, were the direct underbidders.

The disaster painting was one of three Warhols on offer from Stuttgart's esteemed Froelich Foundation, identified in the catalogue as “an important European collection.” The canvas famously appropriates a newspaper story about contaminated tuna that killed two suburban Detroit housewives.

The works in the Warhol trio were aggressively estimated, but thanks to their punchy provenance and rarity, they found buyers in this new market, even if all of them went for hammer prices shy of their low estimates.

Warhol’s 72-by-86 1/4-inch Hammer and Sickle (1976) sold for £2,001,250 (est. £2–3 million), and Diamond Dust Shoes (1980) sold to the tag team of Gagosian and Mugrabi for £634,850 (est. £600–800,000).

“The market seems pretty healthy,” said Mugrabi in the midst of the spectator crush to exit the salesroom on New Bond Street, “and the Hammer and Sickle sold for more money than it ever has before.”

On the living-artist side of the ledger, Peter Doig’s cover lot, Almost Grown, a large-scale oil on canvas of a Canadian landscape from 2000, sold to a telephone bidder for £2,057,250 (est. £1.4–1.8 million). As a comparison, Russian oligarch Victor Pinchuk acquired another Doig painting, White Canoe (1991), for a record £5.7 million at the same house in February 2007.