FREUD PAINTING BREAKS RECORD AT CHRISTIE’S

Lucian Freud’s Naked Portrait of a pregnant Kate Moss sold for a hammer price of £3.5 million ($6.5 million) at a Christie’s International auction last night, setting a record for a work by the UK artist, Bloomberg reports. That record was then broken by the sale for £3.7 million ($6.7 million) of Red Haired Man on a Chair, a work Freud completed in 1963 that shows art student Tim Behrens crouched on a chair in a studio lined with white rags. Both paintings were bought by telephone bidders. The sales came in the middle of a week of winter auctions in London that’s expected to raise as much as £200 million ($372 million).