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Every lot found a buyer in the first of Sotheby's two-day sale of the David Bowie collection held in London on November 9, 2016 and the pre-sale estimate of £8.1 million to £11.7 million was easily smashed to reach a total of £24.3 million.

A Basquiat untitled composition of 1984 which had cost £58,700 sold for £2.8 million, while another larger work by the artist titled Air Power, which the singer bought for £78,500, doubled estimates to sell for £7.1 million ($8.8 million) and register the greatest price increase of the sale.

Bowie's earliest acquisition was a 16th century canvas showing St Catherine of Alexandria, which sold above estimate for £191,000 while Duchamp's surrealistic With Hidden Noise went for a double estimate £557,000 and Meret Oppenheim's 1973 painting "La Condition Humaine" rose to £ 197,000 against a £ 20,000 estimate.

Bowie was also interested in the works of British artists such as Frank Auerbach whose early Head of Gerda Boehm, from 1965. sold for a record £ 3,8 million against a shy estimate of £300,000. Eleven records were set for Modern British artists. Peter Lanyon's Witness (1961) went for £ 797,000 against a high estimate of 350,000, while a 1913 drawing of the historian Lytton Strachey by Henry Lamb rose to £100,000 and a 1917 "Interior" (Mrs Mounter) by Harold Gilman bought in 1993 for £ 111,500  soared to £485,000.

Other records included Patrick Caulfield's "Foyer" (1973) bought in 1997 for £36,700 which went for £ 665,000, Ivon Hitchens's "The Boathouse", and an early view of St Ives harbor by Winifred Nicholson, each of which sold for a record £245,000.

Meanwhile, a small watercolour study of the head of James Joyce by the Irish artist Louis le Brocquy, which Bowie bought in 1994 for £1,265 caused sensation when it sold for £68,750. The sale ended with two spin paintings by Damien Hirst, one of which sold for a double estimate of £755,000 while the other fetched £ 785,000 and Lanyon's 1951 landscape, Trevalgan, sold within its estimate for £305,000.