Paintings by Georg Baselitz and Gerhard Richter were among the 80 lots sold at Christie's for a total of $232 million. Jasper John's "Flag" hit the artist's auction record.

Baselitz’ oil on canvas, Franz im Bett, first below, was bought for $1.45 million by an unidentified dealer. This was above the pre-auction high estimate of $1.2 million.

Richter’s Kopf, an oil on aluminum, also beat the pre-auction high estimate with a hammer price of $2 million. Hammer prices do not include the 25 percent buyers premium, or auction house commission.

But the capacity crowd at Christie's Rockefeller Center salesroom focused on Lot 7, a Jasper Johns painting of the American flag from the estate author Michael Crichton. It sold for a record $28.6 million, including commission.

The collection of 31 works brought in $93.9 million for the estate of the late best-selling author who acquired many of the works directly from the artists, including some by 1960s pop artists Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol.

The $231.9 million auction total beat the pre-auction high estimate of $207.4 million, with just five of the 79 lots failing to sell.

American bidders dominated the evening, accounting for 72 percent of the sales, according to Christie’s. “People are feeling good,” billionaire collector Eli Broad said, pointing out that gold reached a record $1,234.50 an ounce in New York on Tuesday.

Last week, Christie’s and rival Sotheby’s sold a combined $593.3 million of Impressionist and modern art. Sotheby's was to hold its spring auction of contemporary art on Wednesday night.

Among those in the packed Rockefeller Center salesroom were fashion designer Marc Jacobs, wearing cowboy boots and a denim baseball cap, author Salman Rushdie and SAC Capital Advisors Chairman Steven A. Cohen, who observed from a skybox.

The presence of tennis star John McEnroe and financier Henry Kravis at the preview promised a lively evening.

Five Records

There were five auction records -- for Sam Francis, Lee Bontecou, Christopher Wool, Mark Tansey and Johns. It was Christie’s biggest Manhattan contemporary sale since May 2008, which totaled $331.4 million.

Johns’s “Flag” was created between 1960 and 1966 with wax encaustic and newspaper. It was expected to sell for as much as $15 million.

New York dealer Michael Altman, better known for such American oldies as Winslow Homer and Andrew Wyeth, said he bought it.

Crichton died in 2008 at 66. He and Jasper Johns, who turns 80 on Saturday, enjoyed a four-decade friendship. The writer acquired the flag directly from the artist in 1973.

Johns’s flag series is considered among the linchpin images of the 1960s Pop Art movement, when artists brought figuration back into painting.

Johns asked Crichton to write the catalog for his 1977 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Crichton’s best-selling works began with “The Andromeda Strain,” which he wrote while a student at Harvard Medical School.

He swiftly ditched medicine and penned blockbusters including Jurassic Park. He also created the hit television show ER.

Crichton characterized his collecting style as “casual.” In a 1980 interview cited in the catalog, he said: “I have neither the knowledge, the devotion, nor the dementia of the deeply committed collector.”

Germerica/Bloomberg