SOTHEBY’S SALE SHOWS CONTEMPORARY MARKET COOLING Sotheby’s sold artworks by Lucio Fontana, Maurizio Cattelan, and Jean-Michel Basquiat at the low end of their valuations Thursday night at a London auction. The second-most expensive lot, Nicolas de Stael’s “Figure Accoudee,” didn’t sell.

The auction showed buyers are getting choosy after a tripling of contemporary art prices since 1996, though they’re still willing to pay up for works they want. “The de Stael was a big disappointment,” said Cheyenne Westphal, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art.

Tonight’s sale came on the fourth and last evening of the winter auctions of Impressionist, Modern, and contemporary art, which are expected to take in as much as $374 million. Some 82% of the works offered were sold, and Sotheby’s took in 15.3 million pounds ($28.5 million), its highest total ever for a London sale of contemporary art.

On the cover of Sotheby’s catalog was Mr. Cattelan’s 1997 sculpture “Charlie Don’t Surf,” showing a child in a hooded coat at a school desk, his hands pinned down by pencils. Valued as high as 800,000 pounds ($1.5 million), it went for 680,000 pounds ($1.3 million), just above its low estimate after Sotheby’s commission was added. There were only one or two bids.

Sotheby’s top-priced lot was Fontana’s 1963 “Concetto Spaziale, La Fine di Dio,” a thickly painted oval pink canvas, pierced to form a moonscape pattern. It was sold for 1 million pounds ($1.87 million), including the commission – a bit below the low estimate and 500,000 pounds less than the high estimate. The work is one of 38 identical canvases by Fontana and was sold by a collector who had bought it at a Sotheby’s London auction in 1993 for 320,500 pounds, the auction house said.

The New York-based auction house had anticipated raising about 13 million pounds to 18 million pounds from its sale tonight of works from the past 60 years. Tomorrow, Sotheby’s will sell lower-priced contemporary works on New Bond Street.

– Bloomberg News

GUELZO, HOLZER WIN LINCOLN PRIZE Because there continue to be a vast number of books about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War era published each year, the annual Lincoln Prize is an important accolade for scholars and enthusiasts of the field. This year’s winners are Allen C. Guelzo, first prize, for his book “Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America” (Simon & Schuster), and Harold Holzer, second prize, for “Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President” (Simon & Schuster).

Mr.Guelzo, a professor at Gettysburg College, will receive $35,000. Mr. Holzer, who is the senior vice president for external affairs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is co-chairman of the U.S. Lincoln bicentennial commission and vice chairman of the Lincoln forum, will receive $15,000.

Established in 1991, the Lincoln Prize is one of the largest literary prizes awarded in the United States. It was endowed by Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman, the principals of the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History here in New York. The prizes are announced on Lincoln’s birthday, and this year they will be awarded for the first time in Richmond, Va.

– Kolby Yarnell