Gunter Sachs amassed a huge, eclectic art collection that will take Sotheby’s two days in May to sell, including a Warhol portrait of the German playboy’s second wife, Brigitte Bardot, commissioned after his divorce. Although it is one of 35 Bardot silkscreens, it’s still expected to sell in the $5m range at the London auction.
Update: The Warhol silkscreen of Bardot sold for $4.7m, which experts called the bargain of the night. All told, the auction brought in $55.8m, almost double the low estimate.A total of 300 lots, encompassing surrealism, pop art, graffiti, art deco, nouveau realism and furniture, is estimated to take in $30m. The Bardot silkscreen was fashioned from a photograph by Richard Avedon. In 1972 Sachs staged the first large exhibition of Warhol in Europe. On the first night not a single art work sold, so Sachs secretly bought half the show to save his friend from embarrassment.
