Gone for a fortune: London in grip of art gold rush

First it was the split carcass of a cow painted by a Belarussian émigré which sold for £7.8m. Then the £12.3m Gauguin and the £5.1m Miro. Not to the mention the eight Munchs sold for £16.9m.

London is in the grip of the greatest art market gold rush in nearly 20 years. The auctioneers Sotheby's and Christie's confirmed yesterday that new records for Impressionist and modern art sales this week, with combined receipts of £130m from their two auctions, the highest total since 1989. In all, 10 world records were broken.

Melanie Clore, a co-chairman of Sotheby's, which raised £68.7mon Tuesday night, the highest figure for a sale in London, said: "Demand is very strong for works of high quality and rarity. When these works come up, there is global interest. The general increase in interest in the visual arts is translating through to great demand for high quality paintings."

The sales saw an influx of newly moneyed collectors from Russia and south-east Asia who are helping to fuel the most buoyant British art market since the heady days of the late 1980s, when Japanese corporate buyers paid inflated prices for works such as Van Gogh's Sunflowers.

The bidding fever has seen the estimates for a succession of canvases dramatically exceeded.

A collection of eight Munch paintings sold at Sotheby's for £16.9m included one work, Summer Day, which sold for £6.2m ­ nearly double the estimate and a record for the artist best known for his workThe Scream.

A new world record was also set for the Belarussian émigré Chaim Soutine for his portrait of a beef carcass, which famously provoked a visit to his studio from police when the stench filtered through to neighbours. The work, Le Boeuf Écorché, sold for £7.8m.

But the booming market has also seen unexpected prices for largely unknown artists, such as Goncharova, a Russian painter influenced by cubism. Her 1912 work, Les Rameurs, sold at Christie's for £1.2m ­ nearly five times the estimate of £250,000.

The buying frenzy continued last night at Christie's with the sale of Francis Bacon's Study From Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velazquez for £5.26m and Lucian Freud's Man in a String Chair, which sold for £4.15m.

Also sold were Eduardo Chillida's Elogio de la Arquitectura for £1.24m, Frank Auerbach's Tree on Primrose Hill for £433,600 and Georg Baselitz's Ein Roter for £1.24m.

Artprice, a French-based consultancy, estimated international auction sales at $4bn (£2.35bn) last year, up from $3.6bnin 2004.

A significant proportion of that money is being spent in Britain. The £12.3m fetched at Sotheby's for Gauguin's Deux Femmes was paid by a UK-based buyer. And nearly half of the Munch paintings were bought by collectors based in Britain.

But experts say that much of the spending power in the newly buoyant market is coming from outside the traditional art collecting bastions of Europe and America, with a new generation of collectors emerging from Taiwan, Singapore, India, Russia and Hong Kong.

The forthcoming sale of two "blockbuster" paintings ­ Van Gogh's 1890 portrait, L'Arlesienne, and Turner's Venice scene La Donna della Salute et San Giorgio ­ is expected to raise the current spending spree to a new height.

But auctioneers denied the market was in danger of repeating the faults of the late 1980s, when works were bought by speculative buyers as rapid investment vehicles.

Olivier Camu, the specialist in charge of Christie's Impressionist and modern art sale, said: "This is a far more mature and considered market. People are not buying to make fast money. What was once a very small pool of people interested in buying art at these prices has grown."