culture cocktails: Miro's 'Blue Star' sells for £23.5m

Joan Miro's 1927 work Peinture (Etoile Bleue) has sold for more than £23.5m at auction, setting a new record for the artist. An anonymous telephone bidder saw off three rivals at the Sotheby's sale in London.

According to reports, the abstract work has tripled in price since it was last sold in 2007 and fetched the highest price reached at a London auction so far this year.

(Miro, Peinture (Etoile Bleue), 1927. source: guardian)

The previous auction record for a Miro was £16.8m, set when his 1925 work Painting-Poem sold in February.

(Miro, Painting Poem, 1925. source: reproduction-gallery.com)

Peinture (Etoile Bleue) - which translates as Painting (Blue Star) is from the Catalan artist's 'dream paintings' cycle and had been expected to fetch no more than £15m.

According to Sotheby's Helena Newman, the high figure reflected the current "unprecedented demand" for the best of 20th Century art.

The second highest price at Tuesday's event was fetched by Pablo Picasso's Homme Assis (1972) which sold for £6.2m.

(Picasso, Homme Assis, 1972. source: Sotheby's)

A Henry Moore sculpture, Mother and Child With Apple, was one of the night's other star performers, raising well above its pre-sale forecast of £3.7m, according to the BBC.

(Moore, Mother and Child With Apple, 1956. source: artobserved.com)

Last month -- 3 May -- Edvard Munch's The Scream became what many think is the most expensive painting in the world when it sold for $120m (aprox £76m.)

(Munch, The Scream, 1893. source: edvard-munch.com)

Other pricey pieces include Picasso's Femme aux Bras Croisés (Woman with Folded Arms) (1902), which sold for $55m (£35m) in 2000; Vincent van Gogh's 1889 piece A Wheatfield with Cypresses, sold for $57m (£37m) in 1993; and Russian painter and designer Kazimir Malevich sold his work Suprematist Composition (1916) in 2008 for a measly $60m (£38m).

(Picasso, Femme aux Bras Croisés, 1902. source: thechive.com)

(Van Gogh, A Wheatfield with Cypresses 1889. source: thechive.com)

(Malevich, Suprematist Composition, 1916. source: thechive.com)

But these works pale in comparison to Jackson Pollock's eye-wateringly expensive No. 5 (1948) which he sold for $140m (£89m) in 2006. In the same year, Gustav Klimt's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) sold for a whopping $135m (£85m).