Klein's Naked Model painting may fetch $ 10 million in New York.

A 1960s work by the French conceptual artist Yves Klein is expected to fetch about $10 million at an auction in New York, Christie’s International said today.

Klein’s 9-foot-wide “Anthropometrie” painting “ANT 93, Le Buffle” (“The Buffalo”) will be offered in Christie’s May 11 sale of contemporary art. The work was painted in the artist’s trademark “International Klein Blue” in 1960-61 on paper, now laid down on canvas, using a naked female model as a “living brush” to create the image of a buffalo.

“This is the second-largest ANT painting to come to auction,” Francis Outred, Christie’s European head of contemporary art, said in an interview. “Very few of his works make a specific reference to an animal. He’s using a naked female figure to make an image of a beast.”