The Iconic Cover of David Bowie’s ‘Aladdin Sane’ Could Become the Most Expensive Album Artwork Ever Sold
Shot by Brian Duffy in 1973, the famous lightning bolt print is estimated to break the record currently held by Led Zeppelin’s self-titled debut album
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David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane has one of the most iconic album covers of all time. Now, it might become the most expensive album artwork ever sold.
The original print of a shirtless Bowie with a red mullet, pink blush and a red-and-blue lightning bolt painted across his eye is estimated to fetch between £250,000 and £300,000 (roughly $336,000 and $403,000) at an auction held by Bonhams in England. That would beat the $325,000 that a bidder paid for the original artwork featured on Led Zeppelin’s self-titled debut album, which currently holds the record.
Quick fact: The making of Aladdin Sane
Bowie described the album as “Ziggy goes to America” because he wrote some of the songs during a North American tour for his previous album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.
Brian Duffy, the iconic London portrait and fashion photographer, shot the image featured on Aladdin Sane during a 1973 studio session. It was his idea to give Bowie a lightning bolt, after Bowie’s manager, Tony Defries, commissioned a “superstar-making” cover, per a statement from the auction house. Makeup artist Pierre La Roche drew the bolt on Bowie’s face, and airbrush artist Philip Castle, a frequent collaborator of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick’s, added a teardrop above Bowie’s collarbone for the final cover.
The art is a dye transfer print, “which is basically one of the highest-quality types of prints that you can do,” Claire Tole-Moir, Bonhams’ head of popular culture, tells the Guardian’s Lanre Bakare. “And at the time of its creation in 1973, it was the most expensive process that was really, really costly. So to have created it at that time was already a privilege.”
The Bowie art leads a collection of 35 items from the Duffy estate that will be auctioned by Bonhams. Called “The Mona Lisa of Pop: The Duffy Archive,” the collection also includes the only two surviving contact sheets for Aladdin Sane, the stool Bowie sat on during the shoot and a handwritten note from Duffy explaining the lightning bolt on Bowie’s face. An original full-body image of Bowie from the Aladdin Sane shoot, which served as the album’s inside cover, is estimated to sell for more than $200,000.
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When most people picture Bowie, they’re picturing Duffy’s lightning bolt image, Tole-Moir tells the Guardian.
“The only other artworks at this sort of significance were the original artwork by George Hardie for Led Zeppelin’s debut album and Elton John’s Captain Fantastic, which made $212,500,” Tole-Moir says. “So it’s right up there.”
Aladdin Sane was the artist’s sixth studio album, the follow-up to his breakthrough The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. The name is a play on “A Lad Insane,” which was the album’s title at one point. According to Chris Duffy, the photographer’s son, the name may have emerged from a miscommunication between Bowie and his father.
“Duffy asked David what the album was to be called, and David replied, ‘A Lad Insane.’ Duffy interpreted this as Aladdin Sane,” Chris Duffy says in a statement. “I guess a genie vision and thoughts of rubbing an Aladdin’s lamp must have appeared to him.”
Also hitting the auction block are mementos from Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), Bowie’s 14th studio album, which also features images shot by Duffy. Five original prints from the shoot, which feature Bowie dressed up as a sad clown, are expected to fetch more than $10,000. The camera that Duffy used for both the Aladdin Sane and Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) covers, a Hasselblad 500C, is estimated to fetch more than $13,000.
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Duffy and Bowie collaborated on five shoots over nine years. Their creative partnership “produced a body of work that defined the visual language of the 1970s and beyond, influencing music, fashion and photography,” Tole-Moir says in a statement.
The Duffy archive has lent the Aladdin Sane art for numerous exhibitions in the past, including to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s (V&A) “David Bowie Is,” which ran from 2013 to 2018 and became the museum’s most attended international touring show.
Earlier this month, the V&A’s East Shorehouse debuted a permanent David Bowie Center. Among other artifacts, the center will feature his notes for The Spectator, a musical he spent his final months working on before he died of cancer in 2016.
Bowie fans still have one more chance to see the Aladdin Sane print before it heads to the auction block. “The Mona Lisa of Pop: The Duffy Archive” will be on view for free at Bonhams New Bond Street between October 22, when the auction opens, and November 5.