£258m paintings set auction world record

Art went crazy in New York last night when Impressionist and modernist paintings sold for £258 million in one evening at Christie's.

Works by Gustav Klimt went under the hammer for £46.1 million ($87.9 million) and £21.2 million ($40.4 million). The total sale made history by setting an art sale record.

New auction records were set for nine artists including Klimt, Paul Gauguin and Egon Schiele. In making nearly $491.4 million dollars, it nearly doubled the existing $281 million (£147million) record for an art auction set in May 1990.

However Lord Lloyd-Webber withdrew his 1903 Blue Period Picasso painting of Angel Fernandez de Soto destined to sell for £30 million hours before the sale.

The mood in the auction room was frenzied as the world's billionaires crowded in. There were high expectations that Ronald Lauder, heir to the cosmetics fortune, would be seeking to add to his supreme German/Austrian collection. Las Vegas casino king Steve Wynn was also showing keen interest.

A group of four Klimt paintings, restored to their rightful heir after being looted by the Nazis, fetched £101.2 million, exceeding all estimates. Biggest winner of the night was Maria Altmann, the 90-year-old niece of Austrian couple Adele and Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, to whom the four Klimt paintings were restituted.

Adele Bloch Blauer II (1912) - a portrait of Klimt's mistress - sold for £46.1 million ($88 million), soaring above its high estimate of £31.5 million and making it the third highest selling painting ever sold at auction. Birch Forest (1903) fetched £21.2 million and Apple Tree I (1912) sold for £17.4 million.

Mrs Altmann, who lives in Los Angeles and who will share the proceeds with her children and grandchildren, said: "My family and I are delighted to see these treasured paintings find new homes. We are delighted and honoured that so many people wanted to partake in history." In June she sold another Klimt painting of Adele Bloch-Bauer for the world record sum of £73 million.

Paul Gaugin's L'hômme à la hache, an 1891 Tahitian period painting, sold for £21.2 million. Another Nazi-looted artwork restituted to its rightful heirs was Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Berlin Street Scene (1913-14) which sold for £20.5 million to New York's Neue Galerie.

The gallery also bought three paintings by German Expressionist painter Egon Schiele, led by Hauser mit Bergen (1915) which sold for £11.8 million. Other highlights included Modigliani's 1917 painting Venus which sold for £8.38 million and Picasso's 1944 Plant de tomates which fetched £7.1 million.