(Bloomberg) — As Sotheby’s contemporary evening sale wound down on Thursday night, Charles Stewart, the company’s chief executive officer, stood in the back of the room with a look of undisguised relief.

Up until that evening, New York’s spring auction week, during which Christie’s, Phillips and Sotheby’s planned to move more than $1 billion worth of art, had been a grind. Most of the art was selling, but often with notably meager bidding, particularly when prices were over the $5 million mark. On Thursday, though, the room came alive with real, aggressive competition for works from the estates of the dealer Barbara Gladstone and the artist Roy Lichtenstein. “This has been, I think, the high point of the week,” Stewart said. “If you want to feel good about the art market, this is the night, and this is the sale.”

A less encouraging evening session had occurred in that very same room just two nights before.

On Tuesday, during Sotheby’s modern evening auction, the most expensive lot of the sales series—a painted bronze bust by Alberto Giacometti that carried a $70 million estimate—flamed out in spectacular fashion. Over three excruciating minutes, the auctioneer Oliver Barker tried to solicit a winning bid, but finally he’d had enough. The work failed to sell (“a pass,” in auction parlance), immediately setting off audible chatter throughout the otherwise hushed salesroom. “Obviously, we would have preferred that it be [sold],” says Stewart. “But it was a real auction moment.”

Needless to say, this week did not exactly herald the return of a frenzied art market. “The Giacometti moment doesn’t necessarily speak to any kind of wider trend, it’s really a one-off moment,” says Matthew Newton, an art advisory specialist at UBS. “But it was a sort of punctuation mark on what has been two years of a really tough cycle for the auction houses.”

Yet there were signs the market may have turned a corner. “This season our totals are higher than last May, and we’re on target to beat November,” says Christie’s CEO Bonnie Brennan. “So the doom and gloom of ‘Oh, the market’s down’? Well, the numbers tell a different story.”

Overall, it was a week that was neither good nor bad, with success or failure varying from lot to lot. “It’s really hard to come up with one real, driving theme behind all of this—it all feels pretty chaotic,” Newton says. “You saw individual collectors choosing to buy individual works and willing to skip out on others.”

Christie’s estimated it would sell between $600 million and $811 million worth of art over the week, and it managed to total a solid $693 million. (Estimates don’t include auction house fees known as buyer’s premiums, but totals do, making it easier for auction houses to hit those projections.) Thanks in large part to the $70 million hole made by the Giacometti, Sotheby’s had a tougher time. It sold at least $400 million worth of art this week, a total that will increase after its Friday contemporary day sales are completed; its pre-week estimates were $485 million to $673.5 million. Phillips, meanwhile, totaled about $73.5 million, just missing its low estimate of $74.7 million.

The market for $10 million-plus artworks is always thin, but this week it felt particularly emaciated.

“The greatest depth of bidding that we saw this week was in the [lower-priced] day sales, in the $1 million to $10 million range,” says Brennan. “We have a much more cautious audience at the $20 million-plus level, and it really requires strategic and thoughtful pricing, strong marketing and really managing expectations.”

Expectations, apparently, were managed. Not only did Christie’s yield the highest totals of the week, but it also dominated the peak of the market, selling nine of the week’s top 10 lots. With the sale of Claude Monet’s Peupliers au bord de l’Epte, crépuscule, it set a new record for the artist’s Peupliers series; and with the $13.6 million sale of Marlene Dumas’ Miss January, it set the record for a living female artist at auction.

But Brennan isn’t taking a victory lap just yet. “As we look to build future sales for the balance of the year, I think we’re going to be really careful about the composition, the size of the sales and the number of lots at certain price points, to make sure that we are being good listeners,” she says. “There’s a fair amount of uncertainty in the world right now, and our market is one that thrives on stability.”

You can see this week’s top 10 lots, which totaled about $279 million, below.

$15.2 million for Gerhard Richter’s Korsika (Schiff) from 1968

$15.9 million for René Magritte’s Les droits de l’homme from 1947-1948

$16.3 million for Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled from 1981

$17.6 million for Alberto Giacometti’s Femme de Venise I, cast in 1958

$23.4 million for Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Baby Boom from 1982

$28 million for Pablo Picasso’s Femme à la coiffe d’Arlésienne sur fond vert (Lee Miller) from 1937

$34.9 million for René Magritte’s L’empire des lumières from 1949

$37.7 million for Mark Rothko’s No. 4 (Two Dominants) [Orange, Plum, Black] from 1950-1951

$42.9 million for Claude Monet’s Peupliers au bord de l’Epte, crépuscule from 1891

$47.5 million for Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue from 1922

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