"Marilyn" fetches $27.6m on record day for Warhol

Last updated at 16:08pm on 17th May 2007

Nearly £200 million of art went under the hammer at Christie's in New York with an Andy Warhol painting of a car crash selling for a record £36.04 million while a portrait of Marilyn Monroe fetched £14m. The highest post-war and contemporary art sale in history saw 26 world auction records set.

Lemon Marilyn and Christies

£14.1m: Lemon Marilyn (left), 'Holy Grail' (right): Warhol's Green Car Crash at Christie's New York sale. Among them was Damien Hirst's Lullaby Winter, a cabinet with pills, which sold for £3.74 million. But it was the sale of Warhol's Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I) for more than double its high estimate of £17.7 million which lit up the sale at Christie's Rockefeller Center HQ last night. The price is a new record for a Warhol but fell just short of the £36.7million paid for Mark Rothko's White Center painting at Sotheby's on Tuesday. That set a new world record for a post-war work of art. Green Car Crash, one of 10 works by Warhol in the sale, had fetched £36,000 at Christie's in London in 1978.

The previous record for a Warhol was £9.2 million paid last November for his 1972 portrait of Chairman Mao Zedong. However last night's anonymous telephone bidder confounded all predictions. Another amazing night at the auction for Christie's in New York