It's four times more for Moore as sculpture fetches £19.1m

 
Bidding war: Reclining Figure Festival by Henry Moore, inset, had been originally estimated at £3.5 million

A sculpture by Henry Moore smashed all records to make £19.1 million - quadruple the artist's previous top price - last night in an auction that fetched a total of £135 million.

At least 800 people packed into the saleroom at Christie's in London to watch a bidding war for Moore's Reclining Figure Festival, commissioned by the Arts Council for the Festival of Britain in 1951.

When the bidding ended the work was the most expensive piece of British sculpture ever sold, easily surpassing the £10.3 million fetched by Damien Hirst's The Golden Calf in 2008.

Moore, who died aged 88 in 1986, is the third Briton after Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud to breach the £15 million mark at auction. The previous record for his work was £4.3 million set by Draped Reclining Woman in 2008.

Christie's original estimate was £3.5 million. "This is an Olympic special for the year of Britain," said a spokesman. "We knew this Festival Hall bronze was extraordinary but we could not be sure what it would make."

Painting-Poem, 1925, a masterpiece by Joan Miró, set another world record of £16.8 million and a Vincent van Gogh once owned by Elizabeth Taylor made £10.1 million in an evening where 28 works fetched more than £1 million.

The bids sent the total past the original estimate of between £86.2 million and £127.1 million and got the traditional February round of sales in London off to an astonishing start.

Giovanna Bertazzoni, Christie's international head of Impressionist and modern art, said the market remained firmly in business for rare and exceptional works. Collectors were reacting "with the greatest determination" to the best art and particularly to pieces not seen in the salerooms before.

"We are particularly pleased to have established record prices for two great artists of the 20th century," she added. Tonight an Impressionist and modern sale at Sotheby's will include a monumental work by Miró called Peinture, which has an upper estimate of £10 million, and a recently discovered landscape, Seeufer mit Birken, by Gustav Klimt, with an £8 million
price tag.

From bronze to gold: top five
british sculptures

1 Henry Moore, Reclining Figure: Festival, 1951. Bronze. £19.1 million last night

2 Damien Hirst, The Golden Calf, 2008. Calf with 18-carat gold horns and hooves in formaldehyde in a case. £10.3 million, September 2008

3 Damien Hirst, Lullaby Spring, 2002. Stainless steel and glass cabinet with painted cast pills. Sold £9.65 million, June 2007

4 Damien Hirst, The Kingdom, 2008. Tiger shark in formaldehyde in a case. £9.56 million, September 2008

5 Henry Moore, Draped Reclining Woman. Bronze.
Sold £4.3 million, June 2008

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