Pop Art works break auction sale records

Roy Lichtenstein's Happy Tears, a comic-book portrait in red and yellow, fetched $7.1m (£4.5m), a record for the artist's work, at auction in New York.

Records were set for works by five other artists – Barnett Newman, David Hockney, Morris Louis, Dan Flavin and Laura Owens – at the Christie's sale of postwar and contemporary art. The previous best for a Lichtenstein was $6m paid for his Kiss ii in 1990.

The auction on Wednesday evening raised a total of $66.9m; of the 75 works, only 13 failed to sell. Christie's attributed the prices to "fierce competition ... for important works". The highest price of the evening – but not a record – was for a Jasper Johns painting, which led a group of nine works from the collection of the Israel Phoenix Assurance Co, assembled in the early 1980s. 0 Through 9 sold for $9.9m to a telephone bidder.

The 1961 painting shows the numerals superimposed in a range of grays.

Newman's White Fire I, which this year had been shown at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Tate Modern in London, set a record when it sold for $3.8m to an anonymous telephone bidder.

Portrait of Nick Wilder, composed in 1966 by Hockney, which is a swimming pool scene typical of his work at the time, fetched a record $2.8m (£1.8m). A 1967 work by Andy Warhol, Big Electric Chair, went for $4.9m, but a 1986 Warhol, Camouflage Last Supper, went unsold.