Francis Bacon's "Study for a Portrait" from 1953 fetched $28,666,155 at Christie's London Post-War and Contemporary Art sale.

LONDON— Powered by a $28.6 million Francis Bacon painting,Christie's Post-War and Contemporary art evening sale made a sizzling £78,817,050 ($125,792,012) on Tuesday evening, beating pre-sale predictions of £55.3-76.8 million. The sale ranks as the second-highest in Europe for Christie's in the category, topped only by the bubble-fueled £86.2 million set here in June 2008.

Fifty-three of the 60 works offered found buyers for a slim buy-in rate of 18 percent by lot and just six percent by value. Nineteen of the lots made over one million pounds and 25 fetched over one million dollars. Buyer geography by lot was dominated by Europe (including the United Kingdom and Russia) with 59 percent, the United States at 26 percent, and the combined areas of the Middle East and Asia an impressive 15 percent.

Five artist records were set, including YBA star Ron Mueck's jumbo-scaled "Big Baby," a 1996 sculpture in mixed media, that sold to a telephone bidder for £825,250 ($1,317,099) against an estimate of £800,000-1.2 million. It was one of nine estimate-busting lots from the collection of Kay Saatchi, the former wife and collecting partner of art mogul Charles Saatchi; overall, her trove brought in £3.9 million ($6.2 million) against a £2.1-2.8 million pre-sale estimate.

In a bit of auction-house synchronicity, another of Saatchi's lots,Paula Rego's "Looking Back," a powerful 1987 composition of family life rendered in acrylic on paper on canvas, sold to another telephone bidder for a record £769,250 ($1,227,723). Rego happens to be Mueck's mother-in-law. That’s right: it was a night of joint son-and-mother-in-law record-breaking.

But the real gas driving Saatchi were the five drawings by Lucian Freud, including the delicately rendered "Rabbit on a Chair" from 1944 in pencil and crayon on paper that sold to a telephone bidder for £1,049,250 ($1,674,603) against an £300-400,000 estimate. The same bidder — paddle number 832 — came back some moments later in the various-owners' portion of the sale to nab Freud's remarkably fleshy and impastoed "Woman Smiling," a 20-by-26-inch canvas from 1958-59, for £4,745,250 ($7,573,419) on an estimate of £3.5-4.5 million.

Remarkably, or so it seems now, the painting last sold at auction at Christie's London in July 1973 for £4,800, above the £4,500 high estimate. An intimate portrait of Susan Boyt, Freud's young art-school lover who bore four of his children, it represented a departure in the artist's evolving style by moving away from his tiny-bristle, super-surreal depictions of the human body to the coarser, thickly painted figuration that continues today.

Pilar Ordovas, the Saville Row-based London dealer and former head of Christie's postwar and contemporary department in London, was one of the photo-finish underbidders. "It's a really important painting," said Orvdovas later. "I would have loved to buy it, but my client wouldn't go higher."

The other underbidder, New York's Alexander Acquavella of Acquavella Galleries, concurred, noting, "We anticipated the Freuds to do well and they did." Acquavella managed earlier on to fight off stiff competition for Kay Saatchi's Freud, "Dead Bird" from 1943 in ink, watercolor, and gouache on card, which he won for £421,250 ($672,315) against an estimate of £220-280,000.

It seemed appropriate that British artists, even such onetime émigrés as Freud, dominated the evening. This trend was best evidenced by Francis Bacon's dark and decidedly gloomy "Study for a Portrait" from 1953 that sold as the top lot to an anonymous telephone bidder for £17,961,250 ($28,666,155). The lot had carried an unpublished, on-request estimate in the region of £10-15 million pounds. Regally seated behind Bacon's de rigeur gold and glass frame, the figure also seemed transitional, between the much-sought-after Pope series and his film-noir like businessmen in dark suits that followed later in the decade.

Peter Droig's "Red Boat (Imaginary Boys)," 1984 (oil on canvas)

Though not quite British, Canadian painter Peter Doig almost made a record with "Red Boat (Imaginary Boys)" from 2003-04, aGauguinesque tropical scene from the artist's later period of living and working in Trinidad that sold to the telephone for a staggering £6,201,250 ($9,897,195) on an estimate of £1.4-1.8 million. It just missed beating the high-flying earlier "What Does My Soul Look Like" from 1996 that made $10.1 million at Christie's New York in 2009 (est. $4-6 million).

If the Doig is any indication, it seems that market taste is shifting to a more decorative, laid-back aesthetic, forgetting about less appetizing world events.

That said, there was healthy interest in Andy Warhol's still cutting-edge "Mao" portrait from 1973, executed at a time when China was still ruled by the myth-making revolutionary. In fact, the image was appropriated by Warhol from Mao's mass produced "Red Book," and not the kind of Polaroid one-shot favored by Warhol during this career-low period following his recuperation from an assassination attempt. It sold to a telephone bidder for £6,985,250 ($11,148,459) on a £6-8 million estimate. The painting was also one of three works bearing a third-party guarantee, all of them — possibly by coincidence — being Warhols.

It also seems that London is building on its reputation as "an amazing trading center for the art world," as Brett Gorvy, Christie's recently elevated contemporary art chairman put it. That seemed plausible with the performance of such works as SpaniardMiquel Barcelo's "Faena de Multeta" composition from 1990, which sold for a record £3,961,250 ($6,322,155) on an estimate of £1.5-2 million, and "Esquina Positiva" ("Positive Corner"), a 1992 sculptural group of four bronze figures by the artist's late countryman Juan Munoz, selling for a record £3,401,250 ($5,428,395) against an 3-5 million estimate. Thee Munoz work debuted in Kassel, at Documenta IX in 1992.

The wide-ranging and sometimes perplexing reception of certain works that permeated the 90-minute-long was further seen when Yoshitomo Nara's scowling girl in a red dress, "Missing in Action" from 1999, leap-froged its estimate and sold for a rousing £914,850 ($1,460,101) on an estimate of £500-700,000.

There were some bumps along the road, however, some of them less-than-visible. This was seen in the sale of Gerhard Richter's grandly scaled "Abstraktes Bild" from 1984 that sold to New York dealerChristophe van de Weghe for £1,441,250 ($2,300,235) on a £1.5-2 million estimate. Undercutting that success, a knowledgeable trade source noted that the same painting had gotten a $3 million offer from Pace Gallery in New York just months ago, and that the consignor of tonight's picture rejected it as too low.

There were a few other auction-house-versus-gallery contretemps in the evening as two works by Chris Ofili failed to sell, including "Trump (aka, Ace of Spades)" from 1997-98, which had been estimated to sell for £500-700,000. The picture had been offered at the Frieze Art Fair last year by New York'sDavid Zwirner Gallery and its relatively short span of exposure killed it this evening.

"I had it at Frieze," confirmed Zwirner as he exited the salesroom, "and I think there's a little bit of fatigue out there that we're witnessing with a number of artists." Zwirner, meanwhile, purchased On Kawara's emblematic, 10-by-13-inch "January 9, 1986" for £181,250 ($289,275) against a £140-180,000 estimate.

The evening action has its finale on Wednesday at Sotheby's with the highly anticipated group of postwar German works from the rarely seen Duerckheim collection.