The market for high art defied the global economic slump last night when bidders in Paris spent more than €210 million (£184 million) at the start of the sale of the sumptuous collection of the late couturier Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, his partner.

In the first night of a three-day auction half a dozen records were broken in the sale of Impressionist and Modern works that was a test of the health of art when most other investments have collapsed.

More than a thousand collectors and their agents competed with telephone bidders in the vast Grand Palais exhibition hall in central Paris for works by Matisse, Mondrian, Braque and de Chirico. The total easily passed the previous world record for the auction of a private collection. That was set in 1997 when the collection of Victor and Sally Ganz brought in the equivalent of €163 million.

The biggest bid last night was for Cowslips on a Blue and Pink Carpet by Matisse, which went for a record €32 million, smashing the presale estimate by the auctioneer of €18 million.

There was, however, a disappointment. Picasso’s cubist Musical Instruments on a Table failed to reach the €25 million price and was withdrawn unsold. The failure of the Picasso did not dampen excitement over the rest of the so-called “sale of the century” that was staged by Christie’s, the French-owned sale-room, in a million-euro setting that it has installed in the iron and glass Grand Palais. Works by Piet Mondrian, a big influence on Saint Laurent, Constantin Brancusi, the Romanian sculptor and Marcel Duchamp, the experimental artist, earned record sums well above earlier estimates.

The 1917 work Madame L. R. by Brancusi went for €29 million, proving to many experts that collectors and investors were ready to put big money into art as a refuge in hard times.

“If it’s rare and high quality, the money is there,” said Howard Schilmer, a California collector who was one of the flock of rich and famous who descended on Paris for the sale. Among others were Bianca Jagger and Viscount Linley, who is a chairman of Christie’s.

Mr Bergé, 79, decided after the death of Saint Laurent in June to sell the 731 pieces that they had collected after they teamed up in business and private life in the 1960s. Proceeds are to be split between medical research focused on Aids and a Bergé-Saint Laurent Foundation dedicated to the work of the late prince of Paris fashion.

The sale was preceded by courtroom flurry yesterday in which lawyers for a China-linked art group tried to block the sale on Wednesday of two bronze fountainheads, a rat and a hare that once graced the Imperial Summer Palace in Beijing.

A judge rejected a request for an injunction and ordered the group to pay costs. The Chinese Government demanded the return of the 18th-century figures that were plundered from the palace in the late 19th century by British and French forces.

Mr Bergé said that the piece should be returned “when China restores human rights”.

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