Sold! The £37m Liquorice Allsort

In fact it is a masterpiece which sold yesterday for an astonishing £36.8million.

The abstract painting White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose), by the American impressionist Mark Rothko, broke the world auction record for post-war art at Sotheby's in New York.

That record had been set only minutes earlier when the British artist Francis Bacon's Study From Innocent X fetched £26.6million.

The sky-high prices also made it likely that more records would tumble today at Sotheby's rival, Christie's, where ten important Andy Warhol pieces are going on sale.

One, Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I), which the pop-art icon painted in 1963, was predicted to fetch more than £17million, while his Lemon Marilyn was priced at more than £7million.

The Rothko painting went to an anonymous buyer for nearly three times the previous auction record for one of his works. It had been predicted that it would sell for about £20million.

It was sold by 91-year-old New York billionaire David Rockefeller, who bought it in 1960 for less than £5,000. Mr Rockefeller, who said most of the money will go to charity, was not even a Rothko fan at the time.

Scroll down for more ...

After yesterday's sale he said he bought the picture on the advice of an old friend, Dorothy Miller, the first curator of MoMA, New York's Museum of Modern Art.

"Dorothy told me Rothko was going to be important because of his bold stripes and vibrant, almost luminous use of colours. She was absolutely right." Since then White Center has hung in Mr Rockefeller's office - first when he was chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank for 20 years, and for the last 25 years in New York's Rockefeller Centre.

Rothko was born Marcus Rothkowitz in Latvia in 1903. He emigrated to America at the age of ten with his parents.

In 1946 he began producing his trademark colour-band paintings. He spent much of his later life on vast mural commissions for clients ranging from Harvard University to New York's Four Seasons restaurant.

The previous record for a Rothko was £11.4million for Homage To Matisse (1954) at Christie's in November 2005. The £26.6million Francis Bacon picture comes from a series based on 17th- century Spanish artist Diego Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X.

It had been in the same private collection for the last 30 years and had never appeared at auction before.