Hugh Grant made millions of dollars last night from his six-year love affair with a screen goddess called Liz.

The star of Notting Hill had a long relationship with the actress Liz Hurley, but the money came instead from his obsession with film legend Elizabeth Taylor.

Grant sold Andy Warhol’s 1963 Pop portrait of Taylor at Christie’s in New York for $21 million (£10 million plus about 12 per cent commission), a record for the Liz series.

Grant had bought the picture at auction at Sotheby’s six years ago for just $3.6 million. Only two bidders competed for Liz before it went to a buyer on the telephone for below the low estimate of $25 million.

Taylor was one of Warhol’s muses of celebrity culture alongside Jacqueline Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. He first depicted her in Daily News, one of his tabloid paintings documenting the illness in 1961 that forced her to interrupt the filming of Cleopatra.

Liz is a unique painting from a group of 13 colourful portraits produced by the pop artist in tribute to Taylor at the height of her silver-screen fame. The 40sq in (258sq cm) image shows the actress against a turquoise background that sets off her scarlet lips and violet eyes. Although using the mass-media technique of screenprinting, Warhol embellished her eyes, skin and make-up with paint applied by hand.

Decades later, Warhol befriended Taylor, and in Rome in 1973 he made a cameo appearance in her film The Driver’s Seat.

The top price previously paid for any of Warhol’s Liz series at auction is the $12.6 million that the jeweller Laurence Graff paid for a portrait with a deep-red background at Sotheby's in May 2005. But prices of Warhols have soared in recent years, with a new artist’s record of $71.7 million set by Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I) at Christie’s in May.

Despite a strong start at Christie’s last week to the autumn sales in New York, the art market faltered when Sotheby’s had a disappointing sale of Impressionist and Modern works, with a quarter of the works failing to sell, including Van Gogh’s Wheat Fields and Georges Braque’s L'Echo. Christie’s was reported to have given Grant a price guarantee in the range of $20 million if bidding failed to materialise.

Last night’s Postwar and Contemporary sale last night set records for a number of artists including Lucian Freud and Richard Prince. Freud’s Ib and Her Husband, a portrait of Freud’s daughter, Isobel, and her partner from 1992, smashed the artist’s record of $15.5 million, with a hammer price of $17,250,000. Richard Prince’s Piney Woods Nurse more than doubled the artist’s auction record, with a hammer price of $5.4 million.

Grant is expected to use his profit from the sale to acquire works by newer artists. Amy Cappellazzo, one of the heads of Christie’s Postwar and Contemporary Art department, told The New York Times that “the seller of the Liz is taking advantage of the strength of today’s market and turning his attention to work by younger artists”.

Some critics had suggested that Grant’s possession was not as strong a piece as some of the other works in the series. Just as Warhol painted Monroe after her death and Kennedy following her husband’s assassination, so his portraits of Taylor came as she was recovering from a serious illness, giving the works an added poignance.

The art market faces a further test tonight when works by Francis Bacon, Warhol, Rothko and Jeff Koons go on sale across town at Sotheby’s New York. Bacon’s Second Version of Study for a Bullfight No. 1 (1969), carries a pre-sale estimate of at least $35 million.

A Bacon Self-Portrait, painted when he was 60, is estimated at least $15 million.

Jeff Koons’s Hanging Heart (Magenta and Gold), 1994-2006, considered one of the most important of his works to be offered at auction, is expected to fetch between $15 million and $20 million.

Cash and canvas

— David Rockefeller paid $10,000 for Mark Rothko’s White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) in 1960. Earlier this year he sold the painting at Sotheby’s in New York for just under $73 million

— False Start, a swirl of blues, reds, oranges and yellows with the names of colours stencilled on it, by Jasper Johns, was bought for $17 million in 1988 by the publishing magnate S. I. Newhouse. Last year it was bought for $80 million at auction

— Police Gazette, an abstract landscape also by Johns, was bought anonymously in 1973 for $180,000, then a record for his work. It fetched $63.5 million in 2006

— A work by the living Australian artist John Olsen was bought for $138,000 in 1999. Four years later it sold for $245,000

— Art investments can lead to big losses. In 1990 a Japanese businessman paid $82.5 million for Van Gogh’s Dr Gachet. Later it sold for just over $8 million

Source: www.artdaily.org; www.moneyweek.com; Mei/ Moses Fine Art Index

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