Christie’s International had its smallest evening Impressionist and modern-art auction in New York since May 2004 as buyers snubbed Picasso and Matisse in favor of conservative 19th-century landscapes and still-lifes.

Last night’s sale totaled $65.7 million, below the $68.7 million-to-$97.2 million presale estimate. Nearly a third of the lots didn’t sell, as collectors and dealers chewed gum, furrowed their brows and sought signs of an elusive rebound in the art market. The tally was down 83 percent from two years ago.

“It’s not been a great sale, but the material was not fantastic,” said London dealer Guy Jennings. “There was some bidding, but it was not euphoric.”

The sale begins two weeks of auctions at Christie’s and publicly traded rival Sotheby’s that will test sentiment in New York’s art market a year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. triggered a Wall Street slump. The auction houses expect a total of as much as $607 million.

Last night, there were no bids for Pablo Picasso’s 1943 blood-red wartime “Tete de femme” (Head of Woman), which was the projected top lot and featured on the catalog’s back cover. At $7 million to $10 million, the estimate was too bold for today’s choosey buyers. Owned by the anonymous seller since 1999, it depicts Picasso’s muse Dora Maar, wearing a hat.

Competition peaked for two late-19th-century works. Edgar Degas’s circa-1896 pastel “Danseuses,” portraying a tutu-clad ballerina mid-stretch, sold for $10.7 million to an unnamed Asian buyer over the phone, besting the $9 million high estimate.