Courtesy Sotheby's

The Giacometti bronze was the evening's highlight, but Gustav Klimt's "Kirche in Cassone-Landschaft mit Zypressen," also brought unexpected results, earning a whopping £26,921,250 ($43,208,606).

Courtesy Sotheby's

Alberto Giacometti’s "L’Homme Qui Marche I" (1961) became the most expensive artwork ever to sell at auction, going to an anonymous buyer for a shocking £65,001,250 ($104,327,000).

Alberto Giacometti Henry Moore Egon Schiele Rene Magritte Camille Pissarro Paul Cezanne Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Gustav Klimt

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That staggering price, which beat the record for any modern sculpture and also smashed the Giacometti’s previous high of $27,481,000, earned by Grand femme debout II at Christie’s New York in May 2008, electrified the salesroom.

The Giacometti helped drive the sale’s overall tally to £146,828,350 ($235,659,502), a record for any auction in London. Of the 39 lots offered, 31 sold, for a buy-in rate of 20.5 percent by lot and 3.5 percent by value. The tally soared way beyond the pre-sale expectations of £69–102.1 million, with 17 of the sold lots exceeding £1 million, and of those, three selling in excess of £10 million. In dollars, 22 of the lots made over a million.

The evening got off to a rousing start as Georges Seurat’s Conté-crayon-and-gouache drawing Garconnet assis (Maurice Appert) from circa 1884 sold to a telephone bidder for £1,945,250 ($3,122,126), nearly double its estimates of £750,000–1 million. The page-sized work last sold at auction at Paris’s Ader, Tajan in November 1989 for the equivalent of $691,000.

Manning the phone line was none other than Sotheby’s president and CEO William Ruprecht, who had a busy night as one of the legion of bid takers.

Paul Cezanne’s masterful still life Pichet et fruits sur une table (1893–94), in oil on paper laid down on panel from (est. £10–15 million) sold to another telephone bidder, again taken by Ruprecht, for £11,801,250 ($18,941,006; est. £10–15 million). The seasoned Cezanne, once owned by the likes of Albert Barnes and Laurance Rockefeller, last sold at auction at Sotheby’s New York in May 1989 for a then record $11,550,000 and was bought in at the same house in May 2001 when it was estimated at $14–20 million.

Impressionist-era pictures mostly lagged behind their modern counterparts. Camille Pissarro’s 1901 cityscape L’Eglise Saint-Jacques a Dieppe, matin, soleil, for example, sold to another telephone bidder for a certainly respectable but less spectacular £2,505,250 ($4,020,926; est. £2–3 million). It last sold at Sotheby’s New York in May 2002, for $2,099,500.

Carefully calibrated bidding was tossed aside, though, as the Giacometti bronze, a rare life-size and life-time cast, came up, and hurdled past its high estimate in what seemed like seconds. New York private dealer Nancy Whyte dropped out at £23 million, and trader David Nahmad at £24 million, leaving the contest to a quartet of telephone bidders.

Murmurs in the packed salesroom grew louder as the bidding surpassed the rarefied stratosphere of £50 million and finally landed at the hammer price of £58 million before premium. Ruprecht’s mystery phone bidder was vanquished by one connected to Sotheby’s specialist Philip Hook, who looked dumbstruck by the astonishing result. Christie’s £76.8 million tally the evening before had looked bright at the time, but lost its luster in the blinding light of the Giacometti.

Five lots later, fireworks exploded once again, for the partially restituted Gustav Klimt landscape and cover lot, Kirche in Cassone-Landschaft mit Zypressen (Church in Cassone-landscape with cypresses) (1913), depicting the beautiful scenery of Lake Garda in Italy in Klimt’s polished handling. It eventually went to a telephone bidder for a whopping £26,921,250 ($43,208,606), well beyond its estimated £12–18 million.

The painting was taken during the Nazi era from the heirs of early Klimt patron and iron magnate Viktor Zuckerkandl in Vienna. Just recently a great-nephew of the family, Georges Jorisch, now 81 and living in Montreal, made an arrangement with the current European owner to sell the work and divide the proceeds. The exact details of the deal, brokered by Sotheby’s, are not public.