The enduring allure of cosmopolitan playboy, style icon, photographer Gunter Sachs and his sex symbol wife Brigitte Bardot played out in Sotheby’s London saleroom on 22 May evening as The Gunter Sachs Collection soared well above estimate, realising £35,628,250 / $56,353,203 / €44,057,951.

Iconic portraits by Andy Warhol - long-term friend whom Gunter Sachs championed from early in the artist’s career –  attracted heated competition, with one of Warhol’s last self-portraits, Pink Fright Wig trouncing its £2-3million estimate and selling for £5,361,250 / $8,479,889 /€6,629,730. Similarly, specially commissioned Warhol portraits of Gunter Sachs himself and Brigitte Bardot (Sach’s second wife, whom he famously courted by hovering in a helicopter over her villa on the French Riviera and dropping hundreds of red roses into her garden) were hotly contested. The former sold for £1,273,250 /€1,574,503 / $ 2,013,900 (est: £300,000-400,000) and the latter for £3,009,250 / $4,759,731 / €3,721,243.

1960s mannequin furniture by Allen Jones sent shock-waves through the saleroom. Three hallmark works (a table, chair and hat-stand) were pursued in an electric chase as bidders left estimates far behind, jumping in extraordinary increments towards final prices some ten times pre-sale expectations. Together, three pieces by Jones made a combined total of £2,587,750 against a combined estimate of £90,000-£120,000. Of the three pieces offered, the top price paid was for the table. It made £970,850 ($1,535,593 / €1,200,555) - more than three times the previous record at auction for the artist.

Commenting on the sale of this collection, Cheyenne Westphal, Chairman of Contemporary Art Sotheby’s Europe, said: “Sotheby’s is tremendously privileged to have been entrusted with the sale of this remarkable collection, which truly captures the essence of Gunter Sachs’ life in the 1960s and 1970s and reveals his little-known side as one of the most visionary and influential collectors of the 20th century. The confluence of zeitgeist, exceptional provenance and arresting images of style-icon Gunter Sachs and movie star Brigitte Bardot – his second wife – by the hottest artists and most accomplished photographers of their time, including Andy Warhol and Richard Avedon, makes this assemblage among the most desirable single owner collections ever to come to market.”