COLOR THAT ART AUCTION BOOM GREEN

The Dow Jones Industrial Average isn’t the only barometer of megawealth that’s been punching the stratosphere lately.

For more than a month now, prices in the international art market--from rare Renaissance scribblings to the new masterworks of postwar Expressionism--have been sending the super-rich scurrying faster than Ivan Boesky’s tape recorder.

A falling dollar, new Wall Street wealth and coming changes in the U.S. income-tax code have combined to put individual art collectors into a buying and selling frenzy that is setting and then shattering sales records daily.

Tuesday at Sotheby’s auction house in London, art buyers paid $57.4 million for an array of Modern and Impressionist masterpieces, including a 20th-Century record price for a 1911 Cubist work by Georges Braque. The auction, a record for a single night of art sales, surpassed the previous $42-million one-night record set just two weeks ago at Sotheby’s New York salon.

Braque’s “Femme Lisant” was bought by London dealer Thomas Gibson for $9.43 million, including the auction house’s traditional 10% sales fee or “buyer’s premium.”

On Monday, Christie’s London house sold Edouard Manet’s 1878 “La Rue Mosniers aux Paveurs” for 7.7 million (about $11.1 million)--a record for an Impressionist painting and, depending on how you figure world currency rates, an all-time record for any piece of art.

Since the first of November, Sotheby’s and arch rival auction house Christie’s have sold far more than $200 million worth of the world’s artistic patrimony.

“The art market from October onwards has been proving incredibly strong and, after (Monday) night’s sale, we knew anything could happen,” Sotheby’s Fiona Ford told Reuters news agency. “The art market is on a high trend. Unless something catastrophic happens, there is no reason why it should come down.”

Just a few of the outstanding sales of recent weeks:

--Last week, Shelby White Levy, a New York financial writer and wife of a Wall Street financier, bid $1.32 million at Sotheby’s Manhattan for a 6,000-year-old Greek neolithic sculpture.

--On Nov. 18, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, the world’s wealthiest art museum, paid $3.6 million at Sotheby’s New York for four drawings--including one of only two by Leonardo da Vinci remaining in private hands.

--The next day at Sotheby’s, dealer Richard Pichler, representing unnamed Japanese collectors, bid $5.1 million for a Piet Mondrian painting, a record for the artist and then the second-highest price ever paid for a 20th-Century painting.

--That same night, Christie’s in New York sold a Matisse bronze, “Reclining Nude,” to an unnamed American collector.

--Jeffrey Deitsch, a Citibank vice president who advises the wealthy on art investments, beat out New York’s Whitney Museum Nov. 11 to buy living artist James Rosenquist’s “F-111” for $2 million. Deitsch was representing an unidentified client. That same day, an anonymous telephone bidder paid $3.63 million for a 1959 Jasper Johns collage.

The reasons behind the art surge are “quite easy to figure out,” said Christie’s New York President Christopher Burge in an interview.

Leading Burge’s list are Japanese and European buyers taking advantage of the weakened dollar, which has been on a downward trend against other currencies for almost two years.

Burge said new buyers, many of whom have been “amassing enormous fortunes” in the stock market in the past few years, entered the art market. Sellers, he noted, face increased capital gains taxes after Dec. 31, prompting art collectors and estates to unload some of their treasures now.

On top of it all, he added, “there has been some pretty impressive art” on the market to boot.

That’s no understatement. Sotheby’s Tuesday-night sale was being called one of the most important London sales since the 1950s.

More than 800 art patrons jammed the London house to see and bid on works by Amedeo Modigliani, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Paul Cezanne, Claude Monet and others. Bids were taken by telephone from the United States, Europe, Japan and other Asian countries. An electronic display board simultaneously converted the bids into various currencies.

Renoir’s “Place de la Trinite,” a Parisian street scene of the mid-1870s, was sold to a private U.S. buyer for $2.6 million.

Monet’s “Le Palais Dario a Venise” was sold to an anonymous Japanese buyer for $2.51 million, and another anonymous Japanese purchaser paid $1.96 million for Modigliani’s “La Petite Louise.”

A work by American Impressionist Mary Cassatt brought $1.41 million from an anonymous buyer, against a presale estimate of $370,000.

“Gallery experts can hardly keep up with the market. You’re going to see works of art bringing $20 million, $30 million, even $40 million before this is over,” said Richard Feigen, a prominent New York art dealer and auction watcher.

Such predictions don’t sit well with all buyers. Museums especially are feeling the pinch of rising prices, and few have been active in the new buying frenzy.

Thomas N. Armstrong, director of New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, lost out in the bidding for the Rosenquist “F-111.” Armstrong, in Los Angeles this week, noted that his and other museums have limited funds for acquisition, and museums that want to conserve and display art may be hard-pressed to compete with persons buying masterpieces with the same passion that they buy stocks or hog bellies.

“Here I am at an auction bidding against Citibank for a work of art,” Armstrong said. “I am bidding against people who are buying the art for investment.”

Of course what goes up always can come crashing back down. Some experts remember the 1973-74 boom as the last comparable period in the market, and those same experts recall the 1975 market collapse that followed.

That’s when, as Christie’s Burge put it, “many people lost their shirts.”