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It’s officially fall in New York and the auction industry is coming out of its summer slumber. With the marquee November sales looming, art market players have been keeping a close eye on the first mid-season day sales of contemporary art, hoping to take the temperature of the market.

On Tuesday, Christie’s held a sale titled “Postwar to Present” that pulled in $30.5 million and had quite a few bright spots. One highlight was Lois Dodd’s painting Reflection of the Barn (1971), which more than quadrupled the high end of its $60,000-to-$80,000 estimate, selling for $378,000, a new auction record for the artist.

This quiet scene of a brown-shingled barn with clouds floating above, seen in the reflection of a window with white curtains, presents multiple frames of view and generated considerable excitement on the block. “The work is complex and original, with various framing devices, planes, surfaces and approaches in each composition,” Julian Ehrlich, the head of Christie’s “Post-War to Present” said in an email. “We believe in the work and her market and have put her paintings as lot one in each iteration of Post-War to Present this year.”

Dodd, who is 97, studied at Cooper Union in New York, and has been active as a painter for more than seven decades. She is known for keenly observed scenes like this one. In 2023, when she was 95, she had the largest show of her career at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn. In an interview with the New York Times pegged to the show, she described the evolution of her working methodology: “At first I used to drive around, scouting for the motif, and then I realized the motif is right here—just open the door or look out the window. It comes to you.”

Only 42 of Dodd’s works have ever been offered at auction, but her market is hot right now. The second-highest price paid at auction was set in March, when a winning bidder paid $239,400 for Green Door and Bed (1994) at Christie’s New York, and in May, her Wild Geraniums (1974) went for $228,600, her third-highest price, at Phillips.