Not a bad night's work as prices go into orbit

Christie's has clocked up Europe's highest ever post-war and contemporary art price for a British work, added a £7.3 million record for the world's leading living artist, Gerhard Richter, and kept the fire burning under the contemporary art market. Not a bad night's work.

The £26.3 million for the Bacon was a whisker under the Bacon record set at Sotheby's New York last May for Study From Innocent X, one of his screaming popes series, and there was good reason.

The triptych on the suicide of seedy George Dyer is strong stuff. It raises issues of taste and comfort to frighten buyers from the US and Middle East who have pushed Bacon's top price upwards from £3m in 2000.

Russian buyers, paying up to £8 million so far, don't seem to mind.

Dyer was an East End crook whom Bacon met while he was burgling Bacon's flat. Bacon thought him a useless thief - he was always getting caught - and gave him his bed and money to get hopelessly drunk in Soho pubs for nine years.

Dyer made several attempts to swallow sleeping pills with the booze. He succeeded in Paris in 1972.

Bacon found him in the hotel bathroom and painted what he saw. It's pungent, wrenching art. A screaming Pope "is easier on the eye", said Brett Gorvy, head of Christie's contemporary art.

The Bacon market is in orbit. But in orbit too are Europe's other leading 1950-70 painters. So last night saw record prices for Richter, Lucio Fontana (£6.5 million) and Bridget Riley (1.48 million) and big upward nudges for Anish Kapoor and Yves Klein.

A third of the works sold over high estimates. Fears of calamity for contemporary art after seven years' climb and three years' boom seemed far away.