Grant makes $22m on Liz

Reuters

GOODBYE LIZ, HELLO CASH: Actor Hugh Grant bought this Andy Warhol portrait of Liz Taylor for $US3.6m. Now, he's sold it for $21m - five times the buy price.

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Hugh Grant scooped up $US21 million ($NZ28m) when he sold an Andy Warhol portrait of actress Elizabeth Taylor at auction in the United States.

The Four Weddings and a Funeral actor sold Warhol's Liz, a turquoisebackground portrait of Dame Elizabeth, at Christie's auction of post-war and contemporary art at New York's Rockefeller Centre this week.

The 1962 portrait went under the hammer for more than five times the price he paid for it in 2001.

The auction also set a record for British artist Lucian Freud, whose Ib and her Husband sold for $US17.25 million.

The figures excluded buyers' premiums.

Warhol's Liz was part of the series of portraits the artist executed in the 1960s.

Talking about the Liz portraits, Warhol has said: "I started those a long time ago when she was so sick and everybody said she was going to die. Now I am doing them all over, putting bright colours on her lips and eyes."

The auction's success eased fears that fallout from credit-market losses had hit the art world.

The concerns were prompted last week when shares in rival auction house Sotheby's plummeted after a Vincent van Gogh painting drew no bids at an Impressionist-art auction.

Jeff Koons' Blue Diamond, described as "dazzling, magnificent, gigantically grotesque and staggeringly beautiful" by Christie's, also sold for $US10.5 million in the auction.

A buyer's premium of 12.3 per cent will be added to the cost of each lot.

PRINCE OF POP ART