The painting, which depicts a white-bearded man in a Tibetan robe, sold for more than twice its high estimate of $1.1 million. It also beat by more than 10 times the artist's auction record set just two days earlier at rival Sotheby's Russian sale. Sotheby's took in $13.8 million in Russian art sales Wednesday.
Christie's auction of 390 lots of Faberge, icons and 19th- and 20th-century paintings and contemporary art took in $13.2 million, surpassing its high estimate of $13 million. About 31 percent of the lots failed to sell.
"A work of art is worth as much as a person is willing to pay for it," said Elena Kuprina, an art consultant who bought the work with her husband, Maxim Lyakhovich, for a Russian art collector of Nicholas Roerich. "This is a cultural treasure."
Lyakhovich also placed a winning $1.2 million bid (without commission), for the senior Roerich's mountainous landscape "The Greatest and Holiest of Tangla" (1929).
It was purchased for the same collection, Kuprina said.
Last April, Christie's took in $17.6 million from the sale of 294 Russian lots. The auction house's annual Russian sales, held in London and New York, swelled to $145.1 million in 2007 from $7.1 million in 2001.
Collecting art became fashionable among the ultrawealthy, including billionaires such as Roman Abramovich, LUKoil deputy CEO Leonid Fedun and Alfa Bank president Pyotr Aven.
"We had a number of regulars who didn't turn up at the auctions in November," said Alexis de Tiesenhausen, Christie's international department head of Russian art. "We had to readjust. The estimates now are about 20 percent less than in November."
Conservative estimates attracted active bidding in the room and on the phone.
A 11.4-centimeter-tall Faberge parrot eating a cracker fetched $290,500, almost six times its presale high estimate. The ruby-eyed bird, carved from translucent chalcedony in St. Petersburg from 1896 to 1903, sits on a red enamel perch, tethered by a silver link chain.
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