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Commenting on the sale, Helena Newman, Chairman, Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art, Europe, commented: “Tonight we saw global bidding across the sale, with avid collectors competing for museum quality and rare works.  There was strong competition for exceptional paintings, notably for Claude Monet, Ernest Ludwig Kirchner and Georges Braque. As we have seen in our recent international auctions, we continued to see the enduring appeal of works that are fresh to the market and are of exceptional quality.”

Giovanna Bertazzoni, International Head of Impressionist and Modern Art, Christie’s: “These strong results illustrate that the art market continues to attract significant levels of spending, particularly for the rarest and most exceptional works of art. It is an extremely intelligent market where pricing is key – and where collectors react with the greatest determination to the rarest works of art, and particularly to those which are fresh to the market. We are particularly pleased to have established record prices for two great artists of the 20th century: Henry Moore and Joan Miró. In both cases, we offered works of art that were among the greatest produced by the artists, and their quality drew the most determined of bidding. It has been a great honour to have presented fine art from The Collection of Elizabeth Taylor, and to have seen three works sold this evening for twice our expectations. We look forward to the day sales tomorrow (8 February), and to the auction of ‘Living with Art’, a spectacular private collection, which will include a further offering of Impressionist and Modern Art and which takes place on 9 and 10 February. ”

Leading highlights of the sale:

The top price was paid for Reclining Figure: Festival, 1951, by Henry Moore (1898-1986) which realised £19,081,250 / $30,148,375 / €22,935,663– a world record price for the artist at auction. In 1949, the year after Moore was awarded the international prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale, he was commissioned by the Arts Council to create a sculpture for the 1951 Festival of Britain; the sculpture sold at this evening’s auction is this work. Its importance lies not only in the significance of the commission itself but also it functions as a ‘key’ to this period of Moore’s work. It was acquired by an anonymous telephone bidder after a 5 minute bidding battle.

Painting-Poem (“le corps de ma brune puisque je l’aime comme ma chatte habillée en vert salade comme de la grêle c’est pareil”), 1925, by Joan Miró (1893-1983) sold for £16,841,250 / $26,609,175 / €20,243,183 – a world record price for the artist at auction (estimate: £6-9 million). Part abstract void, part lyrical free-form painting and part hand-written stream-of-consciousness poetry, Le corps de ma brune… is one of the finest and best-known of an extraordinary group of paintings made by the artist in 1925, in which he successfully pushed beyond the conventional boundaries of painting and the picture-plane to create a radical new mental space; fusing word image and painterly form into a new free-form of expression conveying an hallucinatory or dream-like state of consciousness.

Le livre, 1914-1915, by Juan Gris (1887-1927) sold for £10,345,250 / $16,345,495 / €12,434,991. Executed in Paris between the end of 1914 and the start of 1915, the painting marks the artist’s change of stylistic approach to working from an abstract compositional armature towards its subject matter. First shown at the major post-war Cubisme exhibition at the Galerie de France, Paris, in 1945 and subsequently shown throughout Europe and America in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, it was then unseen for 30 years until the 2005 retrospective in Madrid.

Three works of art from the storied Collection of Elizabeth Taylor fetched a combined £13,787,750 ($21,784,645 /€16,572,876), more than doubling their pre-sale low estimate of £6.2 million. An additional 35 works from the film star’s fine art collection will be offered for sale on 8 February as part of Christie’s continuing sales series devoted to Impressionist and Modern Art.

Vue de l’asile et de la Chappelle de Saint-Rémy, by Vincent van Gogh fetched the top price of the group at £10,121,250 ($15,991,575 /€12,165,743). The luminous landscape, painted in the turquoise and ochre hues of early autumn, is a view of the asylum where the artist spent his last months. Elizabeth Taylor’s father, the art dealer Francis Taylor, had purchased the painting on her behalf at auction in 1963 for £92,000. Up until her death in March of 2011, the painting had hung in the living room of Miss Taylor’s home in Bel Air, CA. Earlier in the sale, a youthful self-portrait by Edgar Degas (1834-1917) sold for £713,250 ($1,126,935 / € 857,327) and a large-scale landscape by Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) entitled Pommiers à Éragny realized £2,953,250 ($4,666,135 /€ 3,549,807).

Conservators at the Prado in Madrid recently made an astonishing discovery, hidden beneath black overpaint. What was assumed to be a replica of the Mona Lisa made after Leonardo’s death had actually been painted by one of his key pupils, working alongside the master. The picture is more than just a studio copy—it changed as Leonardo developed his original composition.

The final traces of overpaint are now being removed by Prado conservators, revealing the fine details of the delicate Tuscan landscape, which mirrors the background of Leonardo’s masterpiece. Darkened varnish is also being painstakingly stripped away from the face of the Mona Lisa, giving a much more vivid impression of her enticing eyes and enigmatic smile.

In the Louvre’s original, which will not be cleaned in the foreseeable future, Lisa’s face is obscured by old, cracked varnish, making her appear almost middle aged. In the Prado copy we see her as she would have looked at the time—as a radiant young woman in her early 20s.

Leonardo da Vinci, and particularly his masterpiece the Mona Lisa, attracts endless sensationalist theories. However, the discovery of the contemporary copy has been accepted by the two key authorities, the Prado and the Louvre.

If the price seems insane, it may well be, since it more than doubles the current auction record for a work of art. And this is no epic van Gogh landscape or Vermeer portrait, but an angular, moody representation of two Aix-en-Provence peasants in a card game. But, for its $250 million, Qatar gets more than a post-Impressionist masterpiece; it wins entry into an exclusive club. There are four other Cézanne Card Players in the series; and they are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musée d’Orsay, the Courtauld, and the Barnes Foundation. For a nation in the midst of building a museum empire, it’s instant cred.

Is the painting, created at the cusp of the 20th century, worth it? Well, Cézanne inspired Cubism and presaged abstract art, and Picasso called him “the father of us all.” That said, “$250 million is a fortune,” notes Victor Wiener, the fine-art appraiser called in by Lloyd’s of London when Steve Wynn put his elbow through a Picasso, in 2006. “But you take any art-history course, and a Card Players is likely in it. It’s a major, major image.” For months, he said, “its sale has been rumored. Now, everyone will use this price as a point of departure: it changes the whole art-market structure.”

The Cézanne sale actually took place in 2011, and details of the secret deal are now coming out as a slew of V.I.P. collectors, curators, and dealers head to Qatar for the opening next week of a Takashi Murakami blockbuster that was recently on view in the Palace of Versailles. The nation, located on its own small jetty off the Arabian Peninsula, is a new destination on the art-world grand tour: current exhibitions include an 80-foot-high Richard Serra and a Louise Bourgeois retrospective (her bronze spider is crawling across the Doha Convention Center), and in March it hosts a Global Art Forum that attracts artists, curators, and patrons from museum groups worldwide.

However, those considering using stamps as an alternative investment need not go this far. Many rare stamps are available in sufficient quantity and condition to be considered for investment purposes, at a cost not far into four figures.

Condition is a crucial variable, though. Best prices are achieved for unused stamps that have the original gum intact and a complete set of undisturbed perforations. Stamps such as Penny Blacks, which had no perforations but were cut from a sheet, should have evenly cut margins. Used stamps should have a clear and lightly applied cancellation mark, rather than a heavy or smudged one. Colours should also be fresh and show no fading.

These requirements limit the number of stamps available for investment purposes, and raise their prices far beyond more humdrum examples.

When buying, timing is everything. While prices are not generally cyclical, investors’ enthusiasm for stamps does go in waves. Many would-be investors were burnt by an isolated dramatic peak in prices in the late 1970s. But, caught at the right time, stamps can show good returns.

I logged a gain in excess of 40 per cent between 2004 and 2008 on a small portfolio of Victorian stamps – even allowing for the impact of a hefty bid-offer spread (the difference between a dealer’s buying and selling price).

SOTHEBY’S have posted $4.9bn in worldwide sales for 2011, marginally up on 2010.

The United States remains the company's primary market, accounting for just over $1.9bn of sales, with the UK second at $1.5bn. Continental Europe yielded $527m, while Asia – largely Hong Kong-based sales – totalled $959m.

The company's biggest grossing sale of the year was the $315.8m Contemporary art evening sale in New York on November 9, followed by the $199.8m Impressionist and Modern art evening sale that took place, also in New York, a week earlier. Together they account for 10.5% of the entire year's sales total.

Dedicated Contemporary art sales, as a whole, brought in around $860m-870m, while those focusing on Impressionist and Modern art totalled around $1.48bn. Neither of these figures, nor those for other specific disciplines, take into account additional material that may have formed part of mixed sales or single-owner collections.

Of the other leading disciplines, jewellery made around $380m, Old Masters – paintings, prints, drawings and sculpture – around $150m, Asian art around $165m and antiquities close to $50m.

The importance of Chinese paintings and works of art was clearly underlined by a total of more than $650m.

Further details of the company's results have yet to be released, but the overall picture shows an encouraging performance in the context of the severe global downturn, reflecting the strength of the Far Eastern economies and the attractiveness of fine art, jewellery and works of art as alternative assets against the backdrop of weak stock and bond markets.

Christie’s International (CHRS) said there was a surge in demand for contemporary art as an investment, after its sales climbed 9 percent in 2011.

The London-based auction house sold 3.6 billion pounds ($5.7 billion) of art and collectibles last year, a pound- sterling record for the company, it said in an e-mailed release sent last night. Contemporary works -- led by Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Mark Rothko -- were the most lucrative category, contributing 735.7 million pounds at public sales, an increase of 22 percent.

Diminished returns from stocks and other financial investments have encouraged wealthy individuals to turn to art, particularly classic contemporary works, as an alternative asset class.

“Investors are entering the market and existing collectors are buying more,” Steven Murphy, Christie’s chief executive, said in an interview. “The ease with which information and images can be accessed through the Internet is also helping create a fundamental increase in demand.”

Equivalent auctions for Impressionist and modern pieces --a powerhouse of record results since the 1980s -- declined 28 percent to 548.6 million pounds, behind Asian art at 552.9 million pounds, which increased 13 percent in 2011.

This is only the second year that contemporary art has topped auctions at Christie’s. Catalogs featuring works by artists such as Warhol, Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons generated a record 772 million pounds of sales in 2007.