David Norman applies his 30+ years experience in the Impressionist and Modern category to the results from this May’s sales in New York where $1.5bn in Modern and Impressionist art was sold. As a result, this season the Impressionist and Modern category returns to a pride of place as the biggest market, a stature it has not held for a decade.

The season was packed with stories from the Rockefeller Estate which featured an extraordinary concentration of Impressionist pictures from artists like Monet, Picasso, Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Juan Gris, Ferdnand Léger, and Georges Seurat.

The biggest, and some of the most impressive, sales came from the Impressionist and Modern Evening sales where works by Modigliani, Kazimir Malevich and Constantin Brancusi set new benchmarks.

Even with those successes and the stratospheric sales totals, the sales results do show that nearly a decade of uninterrupted growth in art prices may be beginning to have an effect on the market. Buyers and sellers are increasingly having a standoff over estimates and expectations.

The Impressionist and Modern market is strong but picky. David Norman explains why.