A PORTRAIT by Pablo Picasso of his mistress has sold for $95.2 million (£51.5 million), the second-highest amount paid for a painting at auction.

Dora Maar au Chat (Dora Maar with cat), which depicts the woman who was Picasso’s mistress for nine years during the 1930s and 1940s, went after a heated bidding process to an anonymous buyer present in Sotheby’s New York auction room.

The portrait, painted in 1941, almost doubled its pre-sale estimate, ranking it just behind the highest price paid for any artwork sold at auction, Garçon à la Pipe, also by Picasso, which sold at Sotheby’s for more than $104 million in May 2004.

“The energy in the room was incredible,” said Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s usually unflappable auctioneer, who admitted that he was surprised when the bidding passed $65 million.

“There’s just a very clear, strong demand for the kind of intense painting with an emotional pull that the Picasso represents, things that are made for our times.”

The anonymous buyer, a man in his 40s who was whisked through a side door as soon as the gavel fell, had sat at the back of the room.

The auction of modern and Impressionist art brought in more than $207 million, the highest total for a sale of its kind at Sotheby’s since May 1990. Two works once owned by the former head of Tyco, Dennis Kozlowski, being sold by court order, also achieved solid prices. Near Monte Carlo (Cape Martin: The Point) by Monet sold for just over $5 million and Flowers and Fruit by Renoir went for just over $2.8 million. Kozlowski was convicted last year of grand larceny.

The auction also set a world record for a Matisse, with Nu Couché Vu De Dos, painted in 1927, fetching $18.5 million.

The high bids were the latest indication that the international art market is booming, with an explosion in prices reminiscent of the 1980s.

Last month a painting by JMW Turner became the most expensive British painting to be sold at auction. Giudecca, La Donna della Salute and San Giorgio fetched $35.8 million at Christie’s in New York.

GOLD MASTERS

Garçon à la Pipe by Pablo Picasso, $104 million (£56 million), sold in New York, 2004

Dora Maar au Chat by Pablo Picasso, $95.2 million, New York, 2006

Portrait of Dr Gachet by Vincent van Gogh, $82.5 million, New York, 1990

Bal au Moulin de la Galette by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, $78 million, New York, 1990

Massacre of the Innocents by Peter Paul Rubens, $76.7 million, London, 2002