This look at the June Impressionist and Modern Evening sale performance is available to AMMpro subscribers. Subscribers get the first month free on monthly subscriptions. Feel free to cancel at any time before the month is up. Sign up for AMMpro here.

The Wall Street Journal is struggling to make sense of the Impressionist and Modern art market based upon last week's results in London. Mistakenly lumping the Imp-Mod market in with a trend in the Contemporary market, the Journal concludes that there's a shift to the middle market.

But that's not what's been going on in this category where the top of the market concentrates value and the middling works are seeing price erosion. Last week in London, the sales saw isolated cases of aggressive bidding around a few high-quality works that were not at the top of the price scale. That doesn't mean the Imp-Mod category is shifting toward the middle market.

The Monet market is a case in point.