AMERICAN ART DELIVERS AT CHRISTIE’S

Buyers set two records at Christie’s sale of American paintings yesterday, a clear sign that global interest in American works of art continues to grow. The $72.6 million in combined sales of 111 lots makes yesterday’s auction a record for an American art sale at Christie’s.

The Midtown auction saw a new record set for any American Modernist painting sold at public auction. Marsden Hartley’s “Lighthouse” fetched $6.13 million after a highly anticipated sale. The painting was recently rediscovered in eastern Germany after more than a half century in storage, and was returned to a descendant of its original owner.

Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Calla lilies with red anemone” had held the previous American Modernist record since 2001, when it sold for $6.17 million.

The auction also set a record for Western American art, a category with $41.47 million in combined sales. Thomas Moran’s sweeping Western landscape “Green River of Wyoming,” which had an estimate of between $3.5 million and $5 million, sold for $17.74 million, a price more than double the old record for a 19th-century American painting sold at public auction.

Avery Galleries of Bryn Mawr, Pa., was the buyer. The previous record was the $8.8 million paid for a John Singer Sargent portrait in 2004.

Albert Bierstadt’s “Indians Spear Fishing” sold for $7.32 million. It had an auction estimate of between $2.5 million and $3.5 million. Childe Hassam’s “Spring in Central Park,” with a presale estimate of between $2.5 million and $3.5 million, fetched $5.54 million.

Jay Akasie

MUNCH’S ‘SCREAM’ RETURNS TO PUBLIC VIEW

Edvard Munch’s masterpiece “The Scream” goes back on display this week for the first time since it was stolen four years ago, but it has suffered permanent damage, museum officials said yesterday.

Masked gunmen stole the work and another Munch masterpiece, “Madonna,” in a brazen daylight raid on the Munch Museum in August 2004. Police recovered the paintings, considered priceless, more than a year later. Two men have been convicted and sentenced.

The two works show signs of damage despite extensive restoration. At a preview of the exhibition called “The Scream and Madonna Revisited,” which opens Friday, water damage to the lower left corner of “The Scream” was clearly visible, as were scrapes on both paintings.

“There has been an extremely comprehensive process to restore the paintings. There was significant damage,” a spokesman for the city of Oslo, which owns the museum, Gro Balas, said. “There is still a moisture stain on ‘The Scream’ that cannot be repaired.”

“The Scream” probably is the best-known of Munch’s emotionally charged works and was a major influence on the Expressionist movement. In four versions of the painting, a waiflike figure is apparently screaming or hearing a scream. The image has become a modern icon of human anxiety.

Associated Press

SPIKE LEE SLAMS CLINT EASTWOOD

Spike Lee is slamming Clint Eastwood over his two recent Iwo Jima movies, saying the filmmaker overlooked the role of African-American soldiers during World War II.

Mr. Lee — whose next film is this fall’s “Miracle at St. Anna,” the story of an all-black American division fighting in Italy during the war — said Mr. Eastwood’s 2006 movies “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters From Iwo Jima” were whites-only affairs.

“He did two films about Iwo Jima back to back and there was not one black soldier in both of those films,” Mr. Lee said Tuesday at the Cannes Film Festival, where he was a judge in an online short-film competition.

“Many veterans, African-Americans, who survived that war are upset at Clint Eastwood. In his vision of Iwo Jima, Negro soldiers did not exist. Simple as that. I have a different version,” Mr. Lee said.

Mr. Eastwood was in Cannes for his missing-child drama “Changeling,” starring Angelina Jolie. At a news conference for the film, a reporter tried to ask for his reaction to Mr. Lee’s criticism, but the moderator cut her off and told journalists to limit questions to Mr. Eastwood’s own movie.

Due in American theaters in October, “Miracle at St. Anna” centers on four Americans — played by Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, Laz Alonso and Omar Benson Miller — in the Buffalo Soldiers division in Tuscany.

Associated Press