The original cover image of David Bowie’s seminal 1973 album Aladdin Sane sold for £381,400 ($497,088) at Bonhams London on November 5th. The sale marks a new auction record for an album cover and for the photographer Brian Duffy, who took the photograph.
The Aladdin Sane cover is one of the most iconic in music history, and it was famously referred to as the “Mona Lisa of Pop” by The Guardian in 2013. It was Duffy’s idea to paint the now-legendary red-and-blue lightning bolt across the singer’s face, which was added by makeup artist Pierre La Roche. Duffy also collaborated with the artist Philip Castle, who completed the cover design by airbrushing the teardrop on Bowie’s collarbone.
“Duffy asked David what the album was to be called, and David replied, ‘A Lad Insane.’ Duffy interpreted this as ‘Aladdin Sane,’” said Duffy’s son, Chris Duffy, in a statement. “I guess a genie vision and thoughts of rubbing an Aladdin’s lamp must have appeared to him.”
Duffy, who passed away in 2010, is best known as one of the “terrible trio” of British photographers (with David Bailey and Terence Donovan) who found fame by capturing London’s bustling cultural scene in the 1960s. Duffy and Bowie collaborated on five different shoots over nine years. Their collaborations also yielded the album covers for Lodger (1979) and Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) (1980).
The Aladdin Sane photo was sold as part of Bonhams’s “The Mona Lisa of Pop: The Duffy Archive” sale. The online auction also included the two original contact sheets for Aladdin Sane, which sold for £19,200 ($25,040), and the stool Bowie sat on for the cover shoot, which sold for £2,816 ($3,672).
The previous auction record for an original album cover was $325,000, set in 2020 at Christie’s New York for Led Zeppelin’s debut album, which was designed by George Hardie in 1969. Original album covers rarely surface at major auctions, but the category has seen prices climb over the past decade. In 2012, a small original collage for The Beatles’s album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) by Peter Blake and Jann Haworth made £55,000 ($71,709) at Sotheby’s. Last year, Alan Aldridge’s original painting for Elton John’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy (1975) realized $212,500 at Heritage Auctions in New York.
