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Miro painting sells for record £17 million in London
February 08, 2012

An employee poses with a 1925 painting by Spanish artist Joan Miro entitled "Painting Poem" An employee poses with a 1925 painting by Spanish artist Joan Miro entitled "Painting Poem"
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A work by Spanish painter Joan Miro sold for nearly £17 million on Tuesday, a record price for the artist on an evening that also saw a van Gogh owned by Elizabeth Taylor fetch over £10 million.

The 1925 painting by Surrealist Miro, named "Painting Poem (le corps de ma brune)" went under the hammer at Christie's for £16.8 million ($26.6 million, 20.2 million euros), soaring over the pre-sale estimate of up to £9 million.

"'Le corps de ma brune' is the finest work from a groundbreaking series of paintings," said Olivier Camu, Deputy Chairman in Impressionist Art Department at Christie's.

"Widely considered the most important of all of Miro's work, the "Poem Paintings" instigated a whole new way of working that Miro would follow for the rest of his life and was to significantly influence Pablo Picasso."

The painting, described by Christie's as "part lyrical free-form painting and part hand-written stream-of-conscious poetry", was sold from a private New York art collection.

The highest price previously fetched at auction for a work by Miro, who died in 1983, was for "La caresse des etoiles", which sold in New York in 2008 for $17 million.

Van Gogh's "Vue de l'asile et de la Chapelle de Saint-Remy" ("View of the Asylum and Chapel of Saint-Remy"), previously owned by the late Hollywood star Elizabeth Taylor, also sold at Christie's on Tuesday for £10.1 million.

The 1890 painting by the Dutch Impressionist, bought by the Taylor's father in 1963, far exceeded the estimated £7 million price tag.

It was one of Taylor's last possessions to be auctioned. The British-American star had amassed an extraordinary collection of jewellery and couture as well as art by the time she died in March aged 79.

A week-long auction of her belongings in New York in December drew total sales of $156.8 million (£99 million, 118 million euros).

A work by the Spanish Cubist painter Juan Gris, "Le livre" ("The Book"), also sold on Tuesday for £10.3 million. Described by the auction house as "a key transitional work", it had been expected to sell for up to £18 million.

AFP