NEW YORK.- Contemporary works by Jackson Pollock, Chuck Close, Dan Flavin, and Ed Ruscha set new records at Christie’s in a $102.1 million sale. This was the first postwar and contemporary auction that raises more than $100 million in Christie’s history, according to Christopher Burge , Christie’s honorary chairman and the evening’s auctioneer.

Jackson Pollock’s “No. 12, 1949,” was sold for $11.6 million. The work was sold by the Museum of Modern Art. Mark Rothko’s “No. 15” (1958) sold for $8.9 million. It was acquired by Robert Mnuchin, chairman of the Manhattan gallery C&M Arts. The work Self-Portrait, 1967 by Andy Warhol, sold for $6.9 million. “Large Florwers” (1964) also by Warhol, sold for $6.7 million. "Jim Beam J. B. Turner Train" (1986) by Jeff Koons sold for $5.4 million.

An important painting made at the very apex of the artist’s meteoric and turbulent career, Jackson Pollock’s Number 12, 1949 is a seemingly complete world onto itself. It is a self-contained cosmos in paint made out of a myriad of interlaced swirls and streaks of vibrant color that weaves a constantly moving, almost evolving, complex pattern of painterly form and energy. Painted for his third exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery in November 1949--the breakthrough show that would effectively launch the artist’s now legendary status--Number 12, 1949 is a work that both celebrates and explores Pollock’s new-found freedom and mastery of the radical "drip" technique he had originated two summers before. It is also a work that formed part of a select group of Pollock’s paintings chosen for the United States Pavilion at the 1950 Venice Biennale--an exhibition which was to have a radical and transforming effect on the development of much avant-garde European art in the early 1950s. Constructed using the full range of Pollock’s seemingly magical fluid painterly language, the painting manages to articulate an emotional intensity from the gossamer-like threads of the gestural drips and meandering lines of its enamel paint. Though it is not a large painting--Pollock painted very few large works in 1949--Number 12 is, nevertheless, one of the most intense and complete statements in the artist’s oeuvre.

The year 1949 was to prove the most decisive and important year of Pollock’s life. After two years of struggle formulating and evolving his "drip" technique Pollock and everyone around him, knew that the time was ripe, for him to assert his radical new work on a wider public. Pollock himself was in a confident and relatively stable frame of mind. Throughout the first part of 1949 Pollock settled into a simple and healthy routine at his house on Fireside Road in the Springs, East Hampton. Isolated from outside influence and the temptations of the city, Pollock worked soberly and keenly on several new paintings for his show in November.