Picasso painting sets record for art at auction $179 million

Women of Algiers, once owned by the American collectors Victor and Sally Ganz, was inspired by Picasso's fascination with the 19th-century French artist Eugene Delacroix. It is part of a 15-work series Picasso created in 1954-55 designated with the letters A through O. It has appeared in several major museum retrospectives of the artist.

The most expensive artwork sold at auction had been Francis Bacon's Three Studies of Lucian Freud, which Christie's sold for $142.4 million in 2013.

Pointing Man, depicting a skinny 5-foot-high bronze figure with extended arms, has been in the same private collection for 45 years. Giacometti, who died in 1966, made six casts of the work; four are in museums, and the others are in private hands and a foundation collection.

His Walking Man I holds the auction record for a sculpture. It sold for $104.3 million in 2010.

Among other highlights at Christie's was Peter Doig's Swamped, a 1990 painting of a canoe in a moonlit lagoon, which could set a record for the British artist. It was estimated to fetch around $20 million. The current record is $18 million.

Monet's The Houses of Parliament, At Sunset, a lush painting of rich blues and magenta created in 1900-01, was estimated to bring $35 million to $45 million. The Monet auction record is his 1919 Water Lily Pond, which sold for $80.5 million in 2008.

Christie's also had a Mark Rothko for sale. No. 36 (Black Stripe), which had never appeared at auction, was estimated to sell for $30 million to $50 million. The 1958 work was being sold by the German collector Frieder Burda, who exhibited it in his museum in Baden-Baden for several years.

Last year, Christie's said its global sales of impressionist and modern art were $1.2 billion, an increase of 19 percent over the previous year.

Related:

Movie mogul buys Picasso at NY auction for nearly $30m

Van Gogh purchase paints picture of China's rich