Andy Warhol's Elvis Portrait Sells For $82m

Rare Andy Warhol portraits of Elvis Presley and Marlon Brando have been sold in a record-breaking auction of postwar art in New York.

Warhol's Triple Elvis (Ferus Type) sold for $81.9m (£51.9m) and Four Marlons brought in $69.6m (£44.1m) at Christie's in a sale which took a total of $852.9m (£541.1m) - the highest total for any auction.

Works by Willem de Kooning and Cy Twombly also broke auction records for the artists.

The portraits of Presley and Brando were acquired by German casino company WestSpiel in the 1970s for one of its casinos and are among Warhol's most famous.

The Elvis, executed in ink and silver paint in 1963, depicts the rock 'n' roll heartthrob as a cowboy, armed and shooting from the hip.

The Brando silkscreen, created three years later, shows the actor in a scene from the 1953 movie The Wild One, sitting astride a motorcycle in a black leather jacket and cap, an image that is repeated four times.

Warhol produced a series of 22 images of Elvis. His Double Elvis (Ferus Type) sold for $37m (£23.4m) at Sotheby's in 2012.

De Kooning's Clamdigger, a life-size sculpture created in 1972, sold for $29.2m (£18.5m), a world auction record for a sculpture by the artist.

The bronze sculpture never left the artist during his lifetime, and it stood in the entry of his studio on eastern Long Island for about four decades.

The inspiration for it came from the clam diggers the abstract expressionist artist observed on the beach every day.

Twombly's Untitled, one of the famous series of Blackboard paintings he made between 1966 and 1971, brought in $69.6m (£44,1m), a world auction record for his work.

With their spiralling lines on a dark grey background, the paintings were so-named because they resembled the slate of classroom blackboard.