Big art month kicks off with £100m auction

Works by leading Impressionist, modernist and surrealist artists from private collectors were sold at Christie's for a total of £105,372,000, the second highest total for an art auction in Europe.

The most expensive painting was Pablo Picasso's Femme au chapeau (1938), which sold for £5,732,500.

Kees van Dongen's L'Ouled Naïl (1910) - a depiction of an Algerian dancer - sold for a record £5,620,000, while Kandinsky's Herbstlandschaft mit Baum (1910) went for £2,932,500.

Twenty-nine lots each sold for more than £1million at the Impressionist and modern art evening sale at Christie's last night. Together with the post war and contemporary art sales the auction house is expected to generate £ 288million - a higher estimate than for any week of sales anywhere in Europe.

The art bonanza sees a projected £530million worth of paintings going under the hammer at Sotheby's and Christie's this month.

Yesterday's auction acted as a warmup for the star attraction - the sale of Francis Bacon's Triptych 1974-1977 at Christie's tomorrow. The masterpiece is expected to fetch more than £25 million, the highest pre-sale estimate for any work offered at auction in Europe.

It is thought the piece could even break all records for a UK or Irish artist, exceeding the £27million paid for one of Bacon's series of screaming Popes last May.

Bacon is one of the world's most collectableartists, with three paintings in the past nine months having sold for more than £15 million each.

Last November at Sotheby's in New York, Study For a Bullfight No 1, Second Version, sold for £22,111,517 and his Self-Portrait (1969) went for £15,915,039. Ten years ago Bacon's highest auction price was £3.6 million.

His desirability among art lovers is a match for other 20th-century greats such as Picasso, Klimt, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

He is now priced far above even Matisse and Modigliani, who only reached half his value in recent sales.

Experts said despite uncertain financial markets, belief in the strength of the art market was unshakeable.

Thomas Seydoux, European head of Impressionist and modern art at Christie's, said: "Clients responded positively to this excellent selection of works of art reinforcing market confidence as we go forward into the year."

The record-breaking sales follow results from 2007 which saw art sales at Christie's total £3.1 billion, the highest in art market history.