Art sales: They'll take Manhattan Among those selling is Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, who is parting with an extremely rare 8ft-by-10ft blue canvas with a white strip, or "zip," down the middle, painted by Barnett Newman in 1953. Most of the other works from this series, entitled "Onement," are in museums, apart from the much smaller Onement V, which was sold last November for a record $22.5 million. Paul Allen's Onement V1 is guaranteed with an estimate of $30 million to $40 million. The painting was last sold at auction in 1993 when it was bought by Christie's owner, François Pinault, for $2.4 million. Pinault subsequently sold it privately to Rales, who is now looking for between $25 million and $35 million for it, which is the same estimate that was placed on the record-breaking small Pollock drip painting which sold for $40.4 million last November. Leading the American Pop art charge are early works by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Warhol's Four Marilyns, 1962, which was last seen at auction in 1998, when it sold for $2.3 million, now carries an estimate of $35 million. Lichtenstein's 1963 Woman with Flowered Hat (pictured) is based on a Picasso portrait of Dora Maar and is estimated to fetch more than $30 million. Only his better-known cartoon-style paintings from the Sixties have made this kind of money at auction before, so this will be a test. And if you thought their prices had already gone beyond reason, records are also on the cards for Jean-Michel Basquiat and Gerhard Richter. From the collection of Venezuelan-born Tiqui Atencio comes Basquiat's classic 1982 painting Dustheads. Estimated at $25 million to $35 million, it is among 25 Basquiat works for auction that week with a combined $56.3 million estimate. Dustheads will surely break the previous Basquiat record of $26.4 million, set last November, because it carries a guarantee. Hanging for the past 12 years in the lobby of the Hyatt Hotel in Chicago is a massive 1968 painting, Domplatz, Mailand, of Milan's Cathedral Square, by Gerhard Richter. The Pritzker family, majority shareholders in the Hyatt Hotel Group, bought the painting in December 1998 for what was then a record $3.6 million. In those days, Richter's photographically based paintings were considered his most important, and his abstractions as more simply decorative. But all that changed, and recently Richter's record was set by a large abstract from Eric Clapton's collection that sold for $34 million last October. Sotheby's reckon that the Domplatz painting will put his figurative work back on top, with an estimate of $30 million to $40 million, which, of course, does not include their buyer's premium charge. With the Francis Bacon market also rampant, two large portraits are on the block for £30 million to $40 million each, while the Jeff Koons market, which has gone very quiet during the recession, is to be tested with several works. Among them is one of his vacuum cleaner sculptures from the Eighties which last sold in 1991 for $137,000 and is now priced at $10 million to $15 million. Talk about cleaning up. With such margins it is easy to see why contemporary art is so far ahead.