$86 million for a bacon triptych leads record sales at sotheby's

In a sensational follow-up to Agatha Christie's $348.26 1000000 auction of postwar and coeval art on Tues, Sotheby's sold on wed 73 works of art for $362.03 1000000.

The six world auction bridge records that were set inside the first hour of the two-hour session sum up the bewildering diversity in style, inspiration and even medium that triggered the most furious bidding lucifer Wednesday night.

The first record, which surprised many in the room, went to a larger-than-life figure of an stripling standing, legs wide apart and penis erect, handled in video-game fashion by its maker, Takashi Murakami. Titled "My Lonesome Cowboy," the fibreglass and iron fictional character, painted in the garish colors that used to be those of porcelain dolls half a century ago, was produced in 1998, in an edition of three, plus two creative person's proofs. Too crude in its facile, almost schoolboyish eroticism to be reproduced in a paper intended for the full general public, it seemed to have stepped out of a nightmarish version of Walt Walt Disney's world. Sotheby's expected it to go for $3 1000000 to $4 1000000, plus the sale complaint in surplus of 12 percentage. It brought $15.16 1000000.

The next world record price could not have gone to a more different work. Yves Klein coined the cryptic title "MG 9" for the panel that he painted a solid blue about 1962. Seen at close one-fourth, the panel has a somewhat grainy texture. That show of ingeniousness made such a tremendous impression on bidders that they sent it climb to $23.56 1000000, nearly three-base hit Sotheby's high estimation.

Three lots later, it was the turn of a work done in 1958 by Piero Alessandro Manzoni to rise to world record heights. At $10.12 1000000, it exceeded the high estimation by "only" half. Part of a series dubbed "Achrome" by the creative person, its format, 113.5 by 144.5 centimeters, or 44.75 by 57 inches, is larger than most, but otherwise differs little from the other "Achrome" works - folding a canvas and coating it in white kaolin can go just so far, when you attempt to introduce diversity into your creative efforts. The artist, who died at age 30, had a deadpan sense of fun at the expense of the establishment, making him a direct heir to the art of the absurd devised by his French predecessors of the Dada movement.

Robert Rauschenberg came next in the succession of world records with "Overdrive." The very large canvas, 213.4 centimeters high, was painted in 1963 in oil and silkscreen ink. Here, too, the legacy of the art of the absurd invented by Marcel Duchamp is in evidence, albeit in very different fashion. The picture imitates the idea of a collage of scraps of every kind, ranging from bits of technical documents to street signs to preliminary sketches of birds. That went up to $14.6 million.

Tom Wesselmann's "Great American Nude No. 48," done in the same year as the Rauschenberg and drawing on the same legacy, also became the most expensive work by the artist ever auctioned as it made $10.68 million. Here, however, the visual effect is totally different. The left half of the picture is done in a neat Hyperrealist style that owes much to the prewar Surrealist art of Magritte, while the right half simulates a half-finished picture.

The most startling of all the record prices on Wednesday, as well as the largest by far, went to a painting that was as disturbing as the previous three seemed innocuous. The "Triptych" was painted by Francis Bacon in 1976. The two lateral panels depict a man whose oval head rests on a body that melts down into nondescript human fragments. In the central panel, ill-defined body parts, possibly animal at the top and decidedly human in the lower area, hang down from the ceiling as if they made up some kind of chandelier.

This latter-day heir to early 20th-century Expressionism does not say a great deal about the painterly skills of Bacon, but it offers a quintessential example of his obsessions that seem to echo the terrors of World War II and the various atrocities committed by totalitarian regimes. Perhaps the "European private buyer" (as Sotheby's put it) who acquired it over the telephone was driven by a sense of history. At $86.28 million, the Bacon became the most expensive work of contemporary art ever auctioned.

World records aside, hosts of extremely high prices further expanded the range of works over which bidders furiously fought. Pure abstraction, as represented by a superbly painted canvas of 1990 by Gerhard Richter, with no title other than "Abstract Picture," was well received as witness the $15.16 million, which nearly doubled Sotheby's estimate and matched the price given earlier for the very figural Murakami.

At times, it looked as if those engaged in the action were bidding for the sheer sake of buying and were willing to target anything in sight. Experienced professionals made no effort to conceal their amazement. Bill Ruprecht, Sotheby's chief executive, seemed in a daze as he told me at the end of the sale that this had been Sotheby's largest contemporary art sale ever. This pretty much summed up the sentiment of the most experienced dealers as they left the room.