The series of postwar and contemporary art auctions in New York have boasted very strong results and numerous record prices so far this week. Two days of sales at Phillips de Pury totalled $78 million, Christie's evening sale with part of the Peter Norton collection topped $247 million, and Sotheby's on Nov. 9 sold four paintings by Clyfford Still for $114.1 million along with eight Gerhard Richter works that mostly doubled their high estimates.

Still's “1949-A-No. 1” brought $61.7 million, which soundly broke the artist's previous record of $21.3 million achieved at a Christie’s sale in 2006. The work was one of four Stills sold at Sotheby's by the city of Denver to benefit the endowment of the Clyfford Still Museum. The museum opens next week and will permanently house most of the oeuvre of this founder of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Only 77 paintings by Clyfford Still are known to remain in private hands.

Coinciding with Gerhard Richter’s retrospective at the Tate Modern in London, eight abstract paintings by the artist, dating from his 1980s and 1990s period of Abstraction-Figuration, were sold from a private collection at Sotheby's. The leader of the well-performing Richters was a massive, purple-blue oil on canvas measuring 102 3/8 by 133 7/8 inches that fetched an artist auction record of $20.8 million (estimate: $9-12 million).

Also on Nov. 9, Takashi Murakami's charity auction for Japanese earthquake victims raised over $8,756,100 million at Christie's. Every lot sold, most above estimates, including a 9-foot "Balloon Monkey Wall Relief" (est. $600,000-800,000) by Jeff Koons that hammered down at $1 million.

On Tuesday night, Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, including the first part of the Peter Norton Collection, achieved $247,597,000. Thirty-three works sold for over the $1 million mark and 16 new world auction records were established for artists including Roy Lichtenstein, Paul McCarthy, Charles Ray, Louise Bourgeois, among others. In total, sell-through percentages were very strong, with 90% sold by lot and 87% by value.

The top lot of the sale was Roy Lichtenstein’s, I Can See the Whole Room…and There's Nobody in It!, which set a new auction record of $43,202,500. Painted in 1961, it is one of the earliest and most important of Lichtenstein's Pop Art pictures, formerly in the collection of the pioneering collectors Emily and Burton Tremaine.  The previous record for a Lichtenstein work was for Ohhh ... Alright..., 1964, sold at Christie’s New York in November 2010 for $42.6 million.

“This is an extremely strong sale result, with great depth of bidding across multiple genres and periods, from the great giants of Pop Art to the strongest artists of the 1990s and the 2000s,” said Brett Gorvy, Chairman and International Head of Post-War and Contemporary Art at Christie’s. “The world’s top ten collectors were present in the saleroom tonight, and a global community of collectors was bidding aggressively on works by the pre-eminent artists in this category – from Lichtenstein to Bourgeois, Ligon to McCarthy, Gursky to Ray.”

The sale got off to a strong start with Part I of the Collection of Peter Norton, the Los Angeles collector and software entrepreneur. Eager bidders snapped up each one of the 26 lots offered, driving prices to new auction records for nine artists. The star lot of the Collection was Paul McCarthy’s Tomato Head (Green), a life-size re-interpretation of a child’s toy, with interchangeable body parts. After a bidding battle involving multiple clients in the room and on the phone, the work sold for $4,562,500, setting a new auction record for the artist.

Further highlights from the Peter Norton Collection included Robert Gober’s Prison Window, an installation work, which sold for $3,386,500, and Charles Ray’s Table, a multimedia sculpture, which fetched $3,106,500 – a new world auction record for the artist. The Collection also featured the provocateur Maurizio Cattelan, whose Untitled, a miniature replica of a commercial elevator, achieved $1,022,500.

In the main portion of the Evening Sale, strong prices were achieved for Mark Rothko’s White Cloud, which sold for $18,562,500 and two works by Andy Warhol: Silver Liz, a luminous portrait of Elizabeth Taylor, which sold for $16,322,500, and Four Campbell’s Soup Cans, painted in 1962, which realized $9,826,500.

Among the themes and trends that emerged during the sale was the strong demand for works by top women artists, led by Louise Bourgeois, Sophie Calle, Barbara Kruger, Vija Clemins, Kara Walker, and Mona Hatoum. Louise Bourgeois’s 21-foot wide bronze, Spider, soared beyond its pre-sale estimate of $4-6 million to achieve a new world auction record for the artist at $10,722,500. The price stands among the highest prices ever achieved at auction for a work by a female artist, exceeding the record price by GBP of £6.4 million set for Natalia Goncharova’s Espagnole at Christie’s London in 2010, and narrowly missing the record price by USD of $10.86 million set for Goncharova’s Les Fleurs at Christie’s London in 2008.