Christie's sale of Impressionist and modern art lived up to its billing as the biggest auction in history, raking in nearly $200 million, led by a group of four Nazi-looted Klimts.
The Klimts included a portrait that fetched the third-highest auction price ever, while new records were also set for Gauguin, Schiele and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner at the $491,472,000 sale in New York.
Christie's auction house employees take telephone bids on Gustav Klimt's painting Adele Bloch-Bauer II
In the end, however, the night belonged to Klimt, and to Maria Altmann, a Los Angeles nonagenarian and the niece of the Austrian couple Adele and Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer who lost the works to the Nazis.
The four paintings, led by the portrait Adele Bloch-Bauer II, fetched a total of $192.7 million including Christie's commission - double the expectations for the works by the Austrian artist which had never been offered on the open market.
Adele Bloch-Bauer II alone went for just under $88 million, becoming the third-highest priced piece of art at auction.
Last summer Manhattan's Neue Galerie obtained Adele Bloch-Bauer Ifor a reported $135 million, at the time the top known price in history for a work of art.
"The results were completely phenomenal, and beyond our wildest expectations," said Christopher Burge, Christie's honorary chairman and the sale's auctioneer.
"Everything, at every level. It was just extraordinary across the board. I've never seen a sale like this," he said.
The total was some $200 million higher than any previous single event, Christie's said.
Only six of 84 lots on offer went unsold. It almost didn't matter that one of the star lots, Picasso's $50 million Blue Period portrait of Angel Fernandez do Soto, was yanked by Andrew Lloyd Webber after an 11th-hour claim and litigation over its rightful title.
The British composer decided not to sell the work, the proceeds of which had been earmarked for charity, without a clear title.
With all the excitement over the Klimts, Gauguin's early Tahiti painting Man With an Axewas somewhat overshadowed, despite setting a record for the artist when it sold for $40,336,000, right in the middle of its pre-sale estimate. That was the same price paid for Klimt's Birch Forest, a 1903 work that carried a much lower estimate of $20 million to $30 million.