May 15 (Bloomberg) -- A monumental, hot-hued painting by Mark Rothko became the most expensive work of postwar art sold at auction when it fetched $72.8 million tonight at Sotheby's in New York.

The stature of seller David Rockefeller Sr. helped propel ``White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose)'' over the artist's previous $22.4 million auction record. The price trounced the previous record before tonight, a Willem de Kooning that sold for $27.1 million in November 2006. ``White Center'' had a presale estimate of $40 million.

The Rothko also shattered a record for postwar art set minutes earlier: Francis Bacon's fierce 6 1/2-foot-high crouching Pope, ``Study From Innocent X,'' sold for $52.7 million to a telephone bidder. The 1962 work, from Bacon's famous series of papal portraits, was estimated to fetch more than $30 million. Meshulam Riklis bought the painting in 1975 and gave it to his daughter, New Yorker Mona Ackerman, who was the seller.

Sotheby's York Avenue saleroom was packed with collectors, dealers and curators perched on folding chairs, including Calvin Klein, hotelier Ian Schrager and former Sotheby's Chairman Alfred Taubman.

Philanthropist Rockefeller, 91, has said he will donate the proceeds of the Rothko sale to an as-yet-unnamed charity.

``Rothko wanted painting to be miraculous for the viewer and for himself,'' said Bonnie Clearwater, author of ``The Rothko Book'' and director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, Florida. ``They weren't just colors on a canvas but a mirror of modern fragmented times.''

Booming Art Market

The Rothko sale came midway through Sotheby's highly anticipated 74-lot auction of postwar and contemporary art, estimated to total as much as $265 million.

Last week's $619.7 million in sales of Impressionist and modern art at Christie's International and Sotheby's in New York confirmed that the art market continues to boom. Expectations were high for this week's auctions, which include work by collector favorites Richard Prince and Andy Warhol.

Art prices no longer appear to be tethered to previous sales. Now they're driven by a global club of billionaires with virtually unlimited budgets.

Rothko, a major Abstract Expressionist, painted ``White Center,'' in July 1950, soon after he developed his signature floating pools of color. ``White Center'' was influenced by a recent trip to Italy, where the artist observed the dry, bright pigments used by Renaissance fresco master Giotto, according to Clearwater.

Acquired in 1960

Rockefeller acquired the painting in 1960 for $8,500 (about $59,000 in current dollars) on the advice of curator Dorothy Miller of New York's Museum of Modern Art.

``I had gotten a Rothko for him,'' the late Miller told an interviewer in 1971. ``One of the early ones with lots of color, a beautiful one. He wanted to have it in his office.''

The painting had hung in Rockefeller's office at Chase Manhattan Bank along with a Chinese statue that had belonged to his mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, one of MoMA's founders. Rockefeller was the bank's chairman.

The Rockefeller name was a big factor in the success of the sale, dealers said.

``While it's a spectacular painting, it's clear the allure of having David Rockefeller's painting in your house is going way beyond what you might otherwise consider reasonable,'' said New York dealer Marc Glimcher of PaceWildenstein gallery, which represents the Rothko estate. ``That kind of thing is becoming irresistible to people.''

(Lindsay Pollock and Philip Boroff write for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are their own.)

To contact the writers of this story: Lindsay Pollock in New York at lindsaypollock@yahoo.com; Philip Boroff in New York at pboroff@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: May 15, 2007 20:18 EDT