A nude painting by Amedeo Modigliani has fetched $170.4 million at a Christie's auction in New York, setting a world record for the Italian artist.

"Nu couché" (Reclining Nude) was sold to an unnamed Chinese buyer, who paid the second-highest price ever for a work of art at auction.

The final price for the 1917-18 portrait – under the hammer for the first time ever – was second only to Picasso's "Les femmes d'Alger" (Women of Algiers) which sold for $179 million at Christie's in May, said a Reuters report.

Modigliani was an Italian painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. He is known for portraits and nudes in a modern style characterised by elongation of faces and figures.

Some half-dozen bidders competed for the canvas, which had remained in the same private collection for some 60 years and was offered as the highlight of a specially curated "Artist's Muse" sale comprising 34 works in total.

In a packed salesroom marked by deliberate but determined competition, bidding started at $75 million – already more than Modigliani's auction record of $70.7 million – and ticked upwards in $5 million increments before an unidentified telephone bidder prevailed at $152 million, Reuters said.

The final price was $170,405,000 including Christie's' commission of just over 12 per cent. The auction house had estimated the canvas would fetch more than $100 million.

While nearly 30 per cent of the "Artist's Muse" offerings went unsold – Lucian Freud's "Naked Portrait on a Red Sofa" was estimated at as much as $30 million but failed to sell – the auction took in $494.4 million in total. That was right in the middle of the pre-sale estimate of $442 million to $540 million.

Nodding to the sale's unsold lots, Christie's' global president and auctioneer Jussi Pylkkanen said that was the risk of "pushing the envelope". He noted some works were either not fresh to the market, or were perhaps aggressively priced.