Even a painting signed three times by Egon Schiele, one of modern art’s most sought-after names, can fail to bring out the bidders at auction.

This was the case Tuesday night when billionaire Ronald Lauder’s oil painting “Prozession” (1911) did not sell at Christie’s evening sale of Impressionist and Modern Art in London. The work shows a downcast older woman and a black-haired girl, whose faces jut out from squares of paint the color of fallen leaves at the cusp of winter. The painting was autographed three times in what may have been a reference to the Holy Trinity.

Mr. Lauder was selling the painting to recoup some of the $135 million he paid to acquire Gustav Klimt’s 1907 “Adele Bloch-Bauer I” for the Neue Galerie last June, according to published reports. The pre-auction high estimate for “Prozession” was $14 million, not including the buyer’s premium.

“We’re kind of delighted to have it back,” Mr. Lauder’s personal curator, Elizabeth Kujawski, said yesterday. “It’s a very sophisticated piece, a very avant-garde Schiele.”

She said her office had already received several phone calls inquiring about buying the work, but no decision has been made on a sale. Three other Schieles owned by Mr. Lauder did sell for a total of about $15.9 million at Christie’s on Tuesday.

Five of a total of 10 Schieles at auction at Christie’s and Sotheby’s failed to sell this week, giving further evidence that even for an immensely popular artist whose work has more than doubled in value in a decade, nothing is a sure sale. The combined high estimate for the sales of all the Schiele paintings and drawings was about $40 million, not including the buyer’s premium, but after bidding was over, the two houses took in only $17 million, including commissions.

Sotheby’s major Schiele failure was a drawing, “Sich Aufstützende Blonde Nackte mit Dunklen Strümpfen” (1914), which was estimated to sell for as much as $6.4 million. The work shows a nude woman with sulfurous-blonde hair on her hands and knees. Her body, in a humiliating pose, is smudged with traces of sea green and red gouache.

“There is an imperfect and expressionistic edginess to the anatomy, which is not what people are looking for,” the director of the Galerie St. Etienne on 57th Street, Jane Kallir, said. “One of the things you want when you spend this kind of money on a Schiele is everyone to know you have a Schiele.”

Of the five Schieles that did sell at auction, three went for more than the high estimates. Two watercolor, pencil, and gouache on simili-Japan paper drawings from Mr. Lauder’s collection, “Die Träumende” (1911), and “Bildnis einer Frau mit schwarzem Haar” (1914) were the best successes at the sales. They sold for $4.2 million and $2.9 million, respectively, at Christie’s. An oil on metallic paint on canvas from Mr. Lauder’s collection, “Selbstbildnis mit gespreizten Fingern” (1909), was the highest grossing Schiele at $8.8 million. An art consultant, Peter Hastings Falk, said the market seemed to respond strongest to Schiele’s figurative drawings. “It’s the angular figures showing such angst” that people are interested in, he said. “Despite the incredible rarity of his works, the market is saying no to some of it. It still depends on the individual work.”

Other art dealers expressed surprise that Mr. Lauder put up “Prozession” at auction because the work is considered more of a connoisseur’s painting than one of the blockbusters that sold in New York last November. Mr. Lauder sold about $45 million worth of Schiele watercolors then. He is said to have more than 100 Schieles still in his collection.

Mr. Falk said that now that “Prozession” had been “burned” by the market, it will likely retreat into storage until a buyer comes along with a significantly lower bid.

“The bottom feeders will now step in and they’ll make low offers on the painting, knowing it’s wounded. Anybody who’s buying it is going to be buying the signature, because it’s a piece of the Holy Grail,” Mr. Falk said.

Christie’s sold about $177 million at its sale on Tuesday, while Sotheby’s took the record for the largest European sale in history at $187 million. Sotheby’s held its evening sale of Contemporary art yesterday, and this evening Christie’s will have its sale of Post-War and Contemporary Art. Both auctions are expected to break previous records. Christie’s expects to break the $20 million mark with Francis Bacon’s “Study for Portrait II” (1956).