One of Andy Warhol's iconic paintings of movie legend Elizabeth Taylor has gone under the hammer at the Phillips de Pury auction house in New York. It marked the end of a distinctly mixed season on the New York art buying scene.

Hollywood superstar Elizabeth Taylor helped bring down the gavel to close New York's spring art buying season.

Andy Warhol's "Liz #5", an iconic portrait of the starlet who recently died, sold for $27 million.,

Chairman Simon de Pury says total sales were double last year's.

Simon de Pury, Chairman of Phillios De Pury and Company, said, "And of course Andy Warhol being towering figure of the second part of twentieth century art and being the father of all the contemporary artists working today, it is no question that the presence of strong works by him has greatly contributed to the success of this sale."

But the numbers still came in on the lower end of pre-auction forecasts.

Analysts say this entire art season has painted a mixed canvas. One sale at Sotheby's, the world's largest publicly traded auction house, barely cleared low estimates. But while another at rival Christie's didn't even hit pre-sale targets, the auction house bounced back with more than $301 million in contemporary and post-war art sales; Christie's highest total since May 2008 when the art world was shook by financial crisis.

An iconic artist like Andy Warhol can break records - but all three auction houses say it's getting difficult to find enough artwork to meet an increasingly global demand.

Simon de Pury, Chairman of Phillios De Pury and Company, said, "There are collectors from the former Soviet Republics. Asian buying has become very very important. And then there are buyers from the Gulf countries, Latin America, so we now have a market where you have collectors from all over the world buying contemporary art from all over the world."

With demand outstripping supply, art experts expect prices to hit new records in the next two to three years.