The mid-season round of London auctions got off to a meteoric start at Christie’s on Tuesday night with a rich mix of Impressionist, Modern and Surreal works selling for a total of £176,986,000.

The market for the relatively esoteric Italian art movement of the mid-1960s known as Arte Povera (Poor Art) took a giant leap forward at Christie’s on Tuesday evening with a single-owner sale that earned £38,427,400 ($63,020,930).

The contemporary art market continued its steady climb at Sotheby’s on Wednesday night, with a sale dominated by a strong grouping of paintings by international blue chip artists that brought in £87,915,500 ($144,550,665).

Powered by a runaway Francis Bacon portrait, Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary evening sale—the last of the London season—surged to £124,192,000 ($206,158,720) on Thursday.

Creations by architect Carlo Scarpa and designs by Ercole Barovier are the main draw at the Murano Glass sale at Munich’s Quittenbaum on February 25.

Timed well with the popularity of contemporary ceramics, Parisian auction house Tajan’s March 4 “Ceramics” sale offers some historical precedents.

Though arch-rival Christie’s soundly beat Sotheby’s in 2013 auction sales by a hefty margin, $5.9 billion to $5.1 billion, the publicly traded firm broke the billion dollar mark in private sales for the first time.

Three pieces of jewelry designed by Pablo Picasso sold last week for a total of $386,250 — fetching more than six times their high estimate.

Stunning piece owned by heiress, with beads measuring 15.4 mm to 19.2 mm, will now be the star lot of Sotheby’s Magnificent Jewels and Jadeite auction on April 7.

The spring auction season opened with a strong and rather unexciting bang at Christie’s Impressionist and Modern evening sale, which fetched $285,879,000 for the 47 artworks that sold.