Horses in fastest gallop to £12m I've seen at an auction

Funds that have fled stocks and shares this winter rained on art at Sotheby's, creating its highest London auction total ever for 76 paintings and leaving dealers and collectors stunned at the brilliance of the prices.

"Fantastic," said Robert Landau, Canada's top Impressionist dealer. "Awesome," declared Lord Dalmeny, Sotheby's deputy chairman. "Have you known a night like it?" asked David Nahmad in the front row, grinning like a child, as befits possibly the richest art dealer in the world.

The painful truth for financiers is that your money is presently safer in Picasso than BP or General Motors.

This has been on open view in the week's glittering evening sales of Impressionist and Modern paintings at Sotheby's and Christie's.

Art is going up fast while everything else trembles over recession because it is awash with cash from stock markets and because buyers are liquid at top, middle and low prices.

This makes the 2005-8 art boom different from that of 1987-90, when funds were heavily borrowed from banks and vaporised the moment interest rates rose. Sotheby's last night saw about 40 per cent of lots sell over high estimate. Franz Marc's Grazing Horses made the fastest stampede to £12 million I have ever seen in a saleroom; Jawlensky's £9.4 million portrait, Schokko, more than doubled its dollar cost in 2003.

The Russian winner of the Marc, on the phone from Moscow, instructed Mikhail Kamensky, the Sotheby's expert bidding for him, to stick his hand in the air and leave it up until he got the picture. He stood like a lifted railway signal for three minutes, until auctioneer Henry Wyndham told him: "You can take your hand down now."

"Art is a confidence game," declared Martin Summers, the Chelsea dealer. "These were good pictures and confidence was everywhere."

Nowhere to be seen were the soothsayers who have predicted doom since last autumn. Art, the economy through the looking glass, that prospers when Wall Street and the FTSE are in trouble, is entering its fourth year of soaring prices for anything high quality and claims to be insulated from crisis at the world's banks.

"It was astonishing," said Sotheby's chairmanWyndham at the end, wiping his brow. "For much of the evening I didn't know what was coming next."