After an unprecedented 15 years of boom, the art market is showing the first signs of collapse.

On Friday evening Sotheby’s sale of contemporary art, including works by Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst, realised only £22m. Presale estimates were from £31m to a high of £43m.

This is the first time since the early 1990s that a leading auction house sale has suffered such a significant reverse. The highest price was £4.3m for Warhol’s Skulls, right, a series of 10 paintings. Yet the upper estimate before the sale had been £7m.

Next highest was an oil by Gerhard Richter, the leading German artist, which sold for £2.8m. It had been estimated to sell for between £3m and £4m. This was particularly surprising as Richter is regarded as continental Europe’s greatest living artist and has a show on now at London’s Serpentine gallery.

Hirst’s Blood of Christ, a stainless steel work which includes hundreds of pills and pig’s blood, went to a European private buyer for £825,000 – little more than half its upper estimate.

This Hirst work is a particularly good indication of the fall in the market as only a month ago Sotheby’s had exceeded market values with its sale of new Hirst works. On the main evening of that sale, 54 of his works went for more than £70m, when the top estimate had been for £62m.

Yesterday Cheyenne Westphal, chairman of contemporary art for Sotheby’s Europe, tried to put on a brave face: “While our total fell short of its low estimate, the sale was assembled in a very different economic environment from that which prevails today. It is important to keep perspective. This market has witnessed rapid growth.”

What was unsaid is that the market may well, like the property bubble, have grown unrealistically. With the credit crunch and the banking crisis hitting the real economy, the boom for art may also be over.

Tonight Christie’s has its London sale of contemporary art with works by Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Andy Warhol. Art lovers will be watching to see if it, too, signals that the great contemporary art boom is finally over.

Among several works for sale is a fascinating unfinished portrait that Freud did of Bacon, estimated at between £5m and £7m. Bacon’s own picture of one of his models, Henrietta Moraes, is priced at up to £7.5m. The most expensive work is a series of woods in different colours by Lucio Fontana with an estimate of £12m.

Closing today after five days is the Frieze contemporary art fair in Regent’s Park, London. Selling art in thousands rather than millions of pounds, business has been steady but has not shown the spectacular performance of last year.

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