A split second after the gavel hit the podium, closing the final auction at Sotheby’s last night, a man in a tuxedo zipped across the front of the salesroom. He carried of tray of glasses brimming with white wine to auctioneer Tobias Meyer and Sotheby’s executives, all of whom needed it.

Sotheby’s troubled fall sale of Impressionist and Modern art raised $270 million, a fat slice below the minimum $355 million the auction house had expected. These semiannual New York sales are bellwethers for the art market: The results set trends and tastes and reprice dealer inventories worldwide. Only 74 percent of this auction sold—chilling results.

The subprime-mortgage meltdown has haunted the art market for months, but Sotheby’s suffered from more immediate troubles on the day of its sale: A 360-point stock market slide and the domino effect of losses and management upheavals at financial institutions appeared to weigh down the hands of bidders. The night’s question: Was the auction a disquieting fluke? Or did it mark the end of an era?

As he raised paddle No. 1,252 last night to bid, longtime American art collector Jaime Longhi said he wondered whether his first major auction purchase would later prove to have come at a “historic moment”—the night the art boom ended. Longhi, a law-firm administrator from West Cornwall, Connecticut, paid $361,000 for a “sexy, provocative” Egon Schiele seminude. Despite the stock market’s recent decline, he said he made a lot of money in it earlier this year. “The fact that the dollar is in free fall is an inducement to switch to hard assets,” he added.

But a centerpiece of the auction, The Fields (Wheat Fields), a Vincent van Gogh that had hung over the artist’s bed at the time of his death and came with a presale estimate of $28 million to $35 million, went unsold. So did a giant Pablo Picasso portrait, La Lampe, which was offered up by the artist’s family at a hoped-for $20 million. A Georges Braque painting of his atelier, priced aggressively at $15 million to $20 million, was passed. Strikingly however, 37 percent of the work for sale went for above their high estimates, and furious bidding greeted a handful of pieces early in the sale, before the Van Gogh failure dampened the mood and drove some top players, including dealer Robert Mnuchin (formerly a top Goldman Sachs partner) and Donald Marron (previously Paine Webber’s C.E.O. and chairman of UBS America, and currently a board member of the Museum of Modern Art) to leave early.

David Norman, co-chairman of Sotheby’s Impressionist department, chalked up the sales results mostly to buyers balking at high estimates on those pieces that didn’t sell. “No matter how great a work is, there are still expectations of how a certain price should be,” he said. Norman noted that the estimates and the auction house’s own guarantees for some of them had been set in a different economic climate, in June, July, and August. (Nonetheless, rival Christie’s, facing similar constraints, raised a far more impressive $395 million in its Impressionist art auction Tuesday night.)

Norman said he expected that most works would still find buyers and quickly, citing the large number of people who approached him after the sale attempting to acquire pieces at fire-sale prices. “I’m not at all ready to read this as a warning or a correction in the market,” he said.