This Iconic David Bowie Album Cover Just Made Auction History

• Brian Duffy’s iconic lightning-bolt portrait of David Bowie for his Aladdin Sane record sold for nearly $500,000, setting an auction record for album artwork.
• The image featured Bowie in glam rock makeup by Pierre La Roche, with airbrushing by Philip Castle.
• Auctioned by the Duffy Archive, the sale also included contact sheets from the shoot and the stool used by Bowie during the session.

The iconic image used for the cover of David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane (1973) has become the most expensive album artwork ever sold at auction after fetching £380,000 ($496,000) at Bonhams London on November 5.

To think of Bowie is to conjure the striking photograph that Brian Duffy shot in a London studio for the musician’s sixth album. It pictures Bowie with a red and blue lightning bolt slashed across his face, with his cheeks, lips, and eyelids rouged against a stark white backdrop.

The instructions from Bowie’s manager, Tony Defries, was for Duffy to create a punchy image worthy of a superstar in the making. He hired Pierre La Roche for the task, a make-up artist credited with first putting the glam in glam rock, as well as Philip Castle, who airbrushed a mercurial teardrop onto Bowie’s collarbone. The image stuck, at once offering Bowie as vulnerable and ethereal. In time, Duffy’s son, Chris, took to calling the image the “Mona Lisa of Pop.”

The album cover was one of 35 lots to hit the block from the archives of Duffy, a fashion and portrait photographer who along with David Bailey and Terence Donovan captured London’s cultural scene of the 1960s and ’70s. The only two contact sheets of Bowie for Aladdin Sane sold for £19,200 ($25,000) and the stool that he sat on for the shoot sold for £2,816 ($3,680). Duffy died in 2010 and his son has since run the Duffy Archive, which provided all the items in the sale.

The Aladdin Sane shoot was one of five sessions Bowie and Duffy would share in a collaboration that also resulted in covers for Lodger (1979) and its follow up Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) (1980). In 2013, the Aladdin Sane shoot got a second wind of life when Chris Duffy allowed the Victoria and Albert Museum to use a previously unseen open-eyed version of the image for its exhibition “David Bowie Is…” The show drew more than 300,000 visitors in London and went onto tour at 12 museums around the world. Earlier this year, a new permanent home for David Bowie’s archive opened at V&A East Storehouse.

Duffy’s stool used by David Bowie during the Aladdin Sane album cover shoot. Photo: Duffy © Duffy Archive & the David Bowie Archive.

“The cover represents a landmark album by Bowie and a pivotal moment in Pop Culture history,” Bonhams’ head of popular culture, Claire Tole-Moir, said in a statement. “We are delighted that its significance has been recognized today with a new world record price.”

The previous record was the $325,000 paid in 2020 at Christie’s for George Hardie’s reworked image of the 1937 Hindenburg disaster, which fronted Led Zeppelin’s eponymously titled debut record.