Sotheby’s says the painting had the highest pre-auction estimate for an artwork at... (Associated Press) This 1917 oil painting, "Nu couche (sur le cote gauche)" by Amedeo Modigliani, was auctioned at Sotheby's in New York for more than $157 million, in their Impressionist & Modern Art evening sale Monday,... (Associated Press) 
 
 NEW YORK (AP) — A 1917 painting by Amedeo Modigliani of a reclining nude woman that was once considered obscene in Paris sold for over $157 million at an auction in Manhattan on Monday. It exceeded the $100m estimate Christie’s placed on last year’s Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi (which sold to a Saudi prince for $450m) and the $140m placed on Pablo Picasso’s Les femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’).
– A nude painting considered too obscene to display in Paris a century ago sold at an auction in New York City for $157.2 million Monday night, setting a new record for Sotheby's auction house but not for artist Amadeo Modigliani, the Guardian reports. Nu couche (sur le cote gauche), the Italian-born artist's largest painting, is one of only five of his nudes ever to hit the auction block. When it was first displayed in Paris a century ago, in Modigliani's first and only solo show, police immediately shut the exhibition down, the AP reports. The artist died three years later at the age of 35. (Another Modigliani nude sold for $170 million in 2015.)