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Picasso's Women of Algiers has become the most expensive painting to sell at auction, going for $160m (£102.6m) on May 11, 2015 at Christie's in New York.

Eleven minutes of prolonged bidding from telephone buyers preceded the fall of the hammer  for much more than its pre-sale estimate of $140m. The final price of $179.3m (£115m) included commission of just over 12%.

The sale also featured Alberto Giacometti's life-size sculpture Pointing Man, which set its own record af $141.3m (£90.6m), the biggest price ever fetched at auction for a sculpture.

The previous world record for a painting sold at auction was set in 2013 at $142.4m, for British painter Francis Bacon's Three Studies of Lucian Freud.

The Picasso oil painting is a vibrant, cubist depiction of nude courtesans inspired by a series executed by Eugène Delacroix in the first half of the 19th Century, and is part of a 15-work series the Spanish artist created in 1954-55 designated with the letters A to O..

He started the Women of Algiers series in 1954 shortly after the death of his friend and rival, Henri Matisse, the master of what he called the Odalisque - exotic paintings of Turkish women in harems to whom he paid homage.

With that canvas, Christie's aimed to set an auction record not only for the artist (Picasso's high stood at $106.5 million, set at Christie's in May 2010 with the painting Nude, Green Leaves and Bust), but also for any work of art at auction.

Getting the works for the auction was billed as being conceptualized by postwar and contemporary art specialist Loic Gouzer, who has fronted headline-grabbing sales before, notably a May 2014 sale that set a dozen artist records, a blockbuster that followed a 2013 sale he organized with Leonardo DiCaprio in favor of the movie star's foundation, which aims to support efforts of environmental preservation. That sale set 13 artist records.