200 One Dollar Bills
200 One Dollar Bills had a pre-sale estimate of $8m to $12m (£4.8m to £7.3m)
Andy Warhol artwork 200 One Dollar Bills has sold in New York for $43.8m (£26.5m) - the second highest auction price for a work by the pop artist.
The 1962 silk screen print, which shows 200 life-sized images of dollar bills, had a pre-sale estimate of $8m to $12m (£4.8m to £7.3m) at Sotheby's.
The contemporary sale fetched $134.4m (£81.3m) with 52 out of 54 lots sold.
Warhol's 1963 painting Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I) sold for a record $71.7m (£43.4m) in 2007.
New record
In Wednesday's sale, a Warhol self-portrait given by the artist to teenage secretary Cathy Naso at his New York studio The Factory in the 1960s fetched $6.1m (£3.7m).
Ms Naso, who kept the work hidden in a cupboard for more than 40 years, said she was overwhelmed by the price.
Bidding was very deep tonight. There is a great desire for great art - consumer behaviour has started to accelerate
Sotheby's head of contemporary art Tobias Meyer
Gray Numbers, by Jasper Johns, fetched $8.7m (£5.3m) while a new record was set for a Jean Dubuffet piece - his Trinite-Champs-Elysees sold for $6.1m (£3.7m).
Wednesday's auction exceeded the estimate by more than 50%.
Sotheby's head of contemporary art Tobias Meyer said that "after a year of not buying, collectors have started buying".
"Bidding was very deep tonight. There is a great desire for great art - consumer behaviour has started to accelerate."
But despite a recovery, the market remains unstable.
On Tuesday, Warhol's Tunafish Disaster, which was expected to make up to $8m (£4.7m), and Jean-Michel Basquiat's Brother's Sausage, which was expected to fetch $12m (£7m), failed to sell at Christie's in New York.
But the sale took a total of $74.1m (£44.2m), which auctioneers said was "reminiscent of 18 months ago" before the art market was hit by the downturn.
Pieces by Johns and Jeff Koons sold strongly in a competitive auction.
While Pop Art was selling in the galleries the truly new art of our generation could not be shown because of its identification with illegal drugs. So galleries wouldn't show psychedelic art and a whole American Art Movement went by unnoticed by the "art world". They were busy getting stoned on uppers and downers and selling pieces of shitty art work such as Andy's and the whole Pop Art Movement that was a rerun, a poorly done rerun of the old Dada art-works. Been there, done that but Pop Art is what history recorded as "our generation's art movement" when it wasn't at all--had nothing to do with the cultural revolution inspired by psychedelics.
Compare Warhol's cut-and-paste art with this representative of psychedelic art, the only art movement to be lost to history because of the same illegality that followed counterculture hippies everywhere they went such as Humboldt County.
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