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.

The highest post-war and contemporary art sale in history saw 26 world auction records set. 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.

Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I) - painted in 1963 - is from Warhol's Death and Disaster series. Christie's had described the image as the "Holy Grail" of his oeuvre. It is based on a photo in Newsweek magazine of an overturned car in flames with the body of the driver, alive but limp, hanging from a post. Another man walks by, seemingly oblivious to the wreck.

Warhol's Lemon Marilyn, a silkscreen of Marilyn Monroe, fetched £14.1 million. The artist, who once said "making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art," wouldhave approved of last night's largesse.

Hirst's vast spot picture Notechis After Humphreys (2000) sold for £1.21 million - establishing a record price for a painting by the artist.

Records were also set for Cecily Brown, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Cindy Sherman, Gerhard Richter and Marc Newson. Sixty-five works fetched more than a million dollars.