Portrait of overweight woman sets auction record

LONDON, England (CNN) - A picture of an overweight woman lying naked on a couch, painted by the British artist Lucian Freud, set a record Tuesday night for the most money paid for any work by a living artist.

The 1995 life-size painting - "Benefits Supervisor Sleeping" - fetched $33.6 million during bidding at Christie's auction house in New York. The previous record was for "Hanging Heart," a painting by Jeff Koons that sold for $23.5 million, said Rik Pike, a spokesman for Christie's.

"Benefits Supervisor Sleeping" depicts Sue Tilley, a manager of a government-run job center in London, lying on her side on a worn-out couch with nothing to hide her folds of flesh.

Tilley, now 51, told CNN she was initially embarrassed to pose naked for the artist but they soon grew comfortable in the studio - so comfortable, in fact, that she confessed to falling asleep while posing.

"I didn't mind if he noticed," she said.

The painting challenges modern notions of beauty and elicits a reaction from everyone who sees it. That may have been precisely the aim of Freud, who told London's Tate Gallery in 2002 that he wanted his paintings to "astonish, disturb, seduce, convince."