Pablo Picasso’s “Nu au Plateau de Sculpteur”, the world’s most expensive painting, was to go on display Monday for the first time at London’s Tate Modern museum.

The 1932 painting set a world record when it was snapped up by a mystery bidder for 106.5 million dollars at New York’s Christie’s auction house last May.

It will be the first time the painting has been displayed anywhere since 1961 and prompted the famous London museum to create a new Pablo Picasso room to house the loaned work.

A colossal self-portrait by “pope of pop” Andy Warhol has sold for $17.4 million at Christie’s in London, doubling pre-auction expectations.

The recently discovered 1967 piece, which measures 1.8 metres square, depicts Warhol with a hand to his mouth in what the auction house called “one of the most representative and iconic images of the artist”.

“It has been an incredibly exciting journey to work with a previously unknown work by Andy Warhol, particularly one with such historic importance,” Francis Outred, head of Post-War and Contemporary Art, Christie’s Europe said.

A celebrated masterpiece by Pablo Picasso has sold at Sotheby’s auction house in London for £25.2 million ($40,5 million), more than double its pre-auction valuation.

“La Lecture” is a work from the Spanish painter’s “annus mirabilis,” 1932, and depicts the artist’s famous muse, Marie-Therese Walter.

Seven bidders vied for the coveted Picasso work, the hammer eventually coming down after six minutes of bidding to finalise the sale to an anonymous phone buyer.

A Chinese face or two in the crowd at the world’s auction houses often means one thing: the gavel will fall on a price far beyond the seller’s wildest dreams.

Fierce bidding by Chinese buyers for a vase at a small London auctioneer in November, for example, drove the price up nearly 40 times beyond its estimate, from around $1.9 million to $70 million.

It was the highest price ever paid for a Chinese artwork sold at auction and equivalent to a huge lottery win for the sellers, who found the 18th Century Qianlong Emperor-era piece while clearing out a house after a relative died.

Christie’s notched up the biggest sales figures in the art auction industry’s history last year, the firm announced Thursday, with record global sales of $5 billion.

And Chinese collectors continued to increase their prominence in the auction rooms as the number of buyers from China, Taiwan and HK accounted for a fifth of the total.

Sales in 2010 were up 53 percent with the firm selling more than half the world’s works over $50 million, including the most expensive painting ever to sell at auction: Pablo Picasso’s “Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust” for $106.5 million.

A sumptuous painting of the Madonna and child by Renaissance master Titian sold for a record $16,882,500 Thursday in New York.

The Sotheby’s auction easily broke a 20-year-old record of $13.6 million for a Titian.

The painting, “A Sacra Conversazione: The Madonna and Child with Saints Luke and Catherine of Alexandria,” depicts the Virgin Mary and the two saints posed around a chubby infant Jesus as he stretches out his left hand.