The seven-foot-wide work seems to have significantly declined in value. When Christie’s brought the work to auction in 2022, that house gave it a $30 million estimate; just before the sale, the work was quietly withdrawn. This time, Sotheby’s has awarded the work a $15 million–$20 million estimate.

Any Basquiat coming to auction is deemed an event, largely due to the phenomenally high prices his work typically commands. Although the recent secondary market prices are still high, Basquiats used to more regularly outpace their high estimates by large sums at auction. The dip in prices could be explained by collectors being more thoughtful about how many millions they are willing to spend at auction, and by auction houses adjusting estimates to better fit those new, high interest rate–driven buying habits.

In May, Basquiat’s Untitled (ELMAR), also from 1982, led a modern and contemporary art sale at Philips, selling for $46.5 million. That painting had been estimated to sell for $60 million. The other two Basquiats sold by the house in evening sales that month—Untitled (Portrait of a Famous Ballplayer), from 1981, and Native Carrying Some Guns, Bibles, Amorites on Safari (1982)—headed to auction at lower values, selling for $7.8 million and $12.6 million, respectively. Those figures, which all include buyer’s premium, were squarely within the works’ estimates.

Christie’s and Sotheby’s, too, had Basquiats for sale in May. An untitled 1984 collaboration between Basquiat and Andy Warhol went to Sotheby’s with an estimate of $15 million to $20 million. It sold for $19.3 million. Meanwhile, yet another 1982 work, The Italian Version of Popeye Has no Pork in His Diet, sold at Christie’s for $32 million on an estimate of around $30 million.

Earlier this year, Phillips’s Americas president Jean-Paul Engelen told Puck’s Marion Maneker that Basquiat was “the new Picasso,” a euphemism for the fact that the artist has now achieved legendary status on the market. According to Maneker, roughly $125 million worth of Basquiat’s work sold in May. Look back to the last four years, and that figure crosses the billion-dollar mark.

There’s no question that Basquiat’s market has juice at the moment, a trend that it likely to continue. The only question is whether Sotheby’s priced the work low enough to get collectors interested. Either way, it doesn’t matter much. The work, according to Sotheby’s website, has a guarantee and an irrevocable bid, which means it has effectively already sold. The question, now, is who’s taking it home.

Before fees, the total hammer price was $104.3 million, which leaned toward the presale low estimate of $95.3 (tallied without fees). While the sale was by no means a rip-roaring success, it was also hardly a disaster and was received with bullishness by the auction house. Long-established artists took home the top prices but several relative newcomers, especially women, fueled excitement.

At close of play, Antonia Gardner, the head of evening auctions, told ARTnews that the lot estimates were “realistic,” suggesting that the current health of the art market—still recovering from 2023’s decline—had tempered presale expectations.

Twelve works by emerging artists including Takako Yamaguchi, Jadé Fadojutimi, and Emma Webster, alongside pieces by artists with developed blue-chip markets such as George Condo, went under the hammer first in The Now, with nine outstripping their high estimates. Only one painting went unsold (Nicole Eisenman’s Biergarten, 2007), while Yamaguchi and Rebecca Warren set artist records. Etel Adnan was the only other artist to witness a record, peaking at $564,159 for her Untitled (c. 1970) later in the sale after four bidders chased the painting, meaning all three of the evening’s record-breakers were women.

On another positive note, 60 percent of works by female artists surpassed their high estimates.

The Now result confirmed the ascendency of Romania’s Victor Man, whose market has seen rapid growth in recent seasons. His paintingThe Chandler (2013) clocked $515,803, five times its high estimate. Iraqi artist Mohammed Sami also had a good night—Electric Column (2021) sold well for $241,783. Sami has been the subject of major solo shows in London and New York, and is set to feature in another solo exhibition at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire in July.

Of the other 58 lots of modern and contemporary art, five sold for more than $6 million (Picasso, Monet, Signac, Bacon, Miró) and five didn’t sell at all. Across both sales, just over half the lots sold topped their high estimates. 

The Spring evening auction coincided with the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1874 and the standout works naturally included paintings by Impressionist trailblazers. Claude Monet’s Arbres au bord de l’eau, printemps à Giverny (1885) nudged past its high estimate of $8.9 million to $9.8 million and Glaçons, environs de Bennecourt (1893) sold for just under $4 million, $500,000 shy of its high estimate. Neither had presale guarantees.

In fact, only seven works were guaranteed and only five secured with irrevocable bids, a reasonably low proportion compared to recent auctions like the Christie’s 20th-century art sale last November when half the lots were financially guaranteed. However, this didn’t appear to inject any nitro into the bidding on Wednesday.

Picasso’s Homme à la pipe (1968), described as “swashbuckling” by Sotheby’s and last sold half a century ago, inspired the auction’s only episode of applause. Auctioneer Helena Newman, chairman of Sotheby’s Europe and co-head of Impressionist and Modern art worldwide, brought the gavel down at $17.4 million (compelled by an Asian collector’s underbid), making it the evening’s top lot. Another work by the Spaniard, a rare example from his blue period (1901-04)—Lluís Vilaró (1904)—was unfortunately pulled before the sale.

A handful of lots sent ripples of excitement through the packed auction room. Francis Bacon’s haunting Study of George Dyer (1970) achieved the second-highest price for a single study of Dyer (Bacon’s lover) at auction, fetching $8.7 million (high estimate, $8.9 million). The compact portrait was included in the painter’s major 1971 exhibition in Paris, the first time a living artist had been given a solo show at the French capital’s Grand Palais since Picasso. Lot 19, Frank Auerbach’s Head of E.O.W II (1964) sold for $5.1 million (high estimate, $6.4 million) against the backdrop of the artist’s ongoing and critically acclaimed exhibition of large-scale drawings at the Courtauld Gallery in London. Before the sale, James Sevier, Sotheby’s European head of contemporary art, told ARTnews that the portrait “carries all the hallmarks of Auerbach’s best works.”

A contingent of punters had apparently pinned their hopes on a dramatic bidding war that didn’t materialize over lot 22, Andy Warhol’s simple but poignant Flowers (1964–65). Immediately after it sold for $1.4 million, the room thinned out. 

Portrait de Geneviève avec un collier de colombes (1944) by Françoise Gilot from the collection of Arianna Huffington, the founder of the Huffington Post, did incite some serious tension as four phone bidders dueled with one in the room. The painting eventually sold for four times its estimate at $918,774, marking one of the highest prices realized for Gilot at auction.

There was serious public interest leading up to the sale as 7,500 people visited the exhibition over a week, and bidding was global, with participants from 41 countries.

While a Chinese buyer bagged Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Fleurs dan un vase (c. 1878) for $3.1 million, there was otherwise a notable lack of Asian bidders. An upbeat Harry Dalmeny, Sotheby’s UK chairman, told ARTnews that “the timing of evening sales in London isn’t ideal for bidders in China.” James Sevier, the European contemporary art head, said that he was encouraged by the number of online bids coming from elsewhere, saying “it’s never been easier to buy at auction, which is only a good thing for the houses.”

The bidding was described as “slow, measured, and respectable” by Simon Shaw, Sotheby’s vice chairman of global fine arts. He was optimistic about the result, adding that the “froth of 2023 was clearing” and the sale was “positive.”

Sotheby’s is now preparing for its modern and contemporary day auction on March 7, with big names like Henri Matisse, Edgar Degas, and Banksy set to feature.  

The Bacon, Landscape near Malabata, Tangier (1963), is estimated at £15 million-£20 million. It was painted as a tribute to Peter Lacy, with whom the artist had a years-long passionate, and often abusive, relationship. 

Bacon made the painting in London, just one year after Lacy died tragically in Tangiers at 46. The painting has remained in the same collection for more than 20 years. When it last sold at auction, at Sotheby’s New York for $517,000 in 1985, it became the most expensive Bacon ever sold. (Today, Bacon’s auction record is for the 1969 picture Three Studies of Lucian Freud, which sold at Christie’s New York for $142.4 million in 2013.)

The Bacon painting was originally sold by Marlborough Gallery in 1963 and, according to Christie’s, has been on view in 32 exhibitions across 27 cities worldwide, including the 1971–72 retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris and the Royal Academy of Arts’s “Francis Bacon: Man and Beast” in 2022.

Monet’s Matinée sur la Seine, temps net (1897) is among the 21 pictures that make up the artist’s “Mornings on the Seine” series. Each work in it focuses of the same section of the famous river at different times of the day. 

Estimated to bring in £12 million-£18 million, Matinée sur la Seine, temps net is coming to auction for the first time in 45 years. 

The work was made in Monet’s bateau-atelier (studio-boat) in the middle of the river that snaked through Giverny, the countryside village where Monet created some of his most recognized works, including the “Nymphéas” (Water Lilies) series.

Matinée sur la Seine, temps net was last exhibited in 1990 as part of the “Monet in the ‘90s: The Series Paintings,” held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

The Bacon painting will be on display at Christie’s New York through February 19, and both pictures will be on display at Christie’s London from March 1 through 7.

Together, the three houses pulled in a collective £139 million ($168 million) with fees. (That figure excludes the sum from a single-owner sale at Christie’s last week.) The evening sales hammered at a total of £112 million ($136 million), well below the £130 million combined low estimate. Across the eight total sales dedicated to contemporary art conducted by the houses, some 622 artworks were for sale, of which only 500 works, or 80 percent, of them sold.

According to data collected by Pi-eX, an auction data analyst, the total between day and evening sales was down 18 percent from last year’s equivalent sales, a far cry from the £232 million ($301.6 million) achieved in 2022.

Combined, the sum brought in across the three evening sales dedicated to contemporary and modern was a 20 percent drop from the collective £172 million ($210.5 million) with fees that was brought in last year during the same period.

The dip signals some reticence market-wide ahead of a forthcoming tranche of evening sales scheduled to take place next month in New York. A sale of contemporary artworks from the collection of Liu Yiqian, the founder of Shanghai’s Long Museum at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong earlier this month unfolded in similar fashion, surprising market watchers when it brought in just $69.5 million. The final sum fell far from its target of $95.4 million.

During Christie’s modern and contemporary art sale, a 1918 painting by the Dutch-French artist Kees van Dongen emerged as the leading lot of the week. The work, La Quiétude, went for £10.8 million ($14 million) with buyer’s fees, selling for three times its presale estimate. Following closely behind, value-wise, was Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Future Sciences Versus the Man (1982), which brought in £10.4 million ($13.5 million).

Meanwhile, the painter Paula Rego, who died in June of last year at the age of 87, was among the top-selling artists. Rego’s Dancing Ostriches from Walt Disney’s ‘Fantasia,’ a figurative scene featuring Rego’s former assistant Lila Nunes, set a new benchmark for the artist at auction, with a record price of £3.1 million.

In total, Christie’s London contemporary art evening sale generated £44.7 million ($54.5 million), with 88 percent of the lots sold.

At Sotheby’s, Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild (1986), one of the major lots headed to auction last week, failed to sell. As a result, the evening sale total came to just £24.4 million ($31.7 million), falling below its presale target of £39.9 million ($48 million).

The houses’s 21-lot ultra-contemporary “Now” evening sale performed better. It surpassed the presale £9.3 million ($11 million) estimate, bringing in a collective £15.5 million ($18.9 million) with buyer’s fees.

A painting by Iraqi-born painter Mohammed Sami, titled Poor Folk (2019), fetched £558,500 ($680,755), seven times its low estimate. It depicts a prickly cactus on a sheeted bed, and it reset Sami’s record for the second time this year alone. Bidding for the work involved 10 people in the auction room, along with those on the phone with Sotheby’s specialists.

A third of the lots went to buyers based in the US, a Sotheby’s representative said after the sale, while 20 percent of buyers were from Asia.

In that sale, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Six Birds in the Bush (2015) fetched an impressive £2.95 million ($3.6 million), exceeding the estimated value range of £1.2 million–£1.8 million ($1.5 million–$2.2 million) and setting a new record for the British artist. Yiadom-Boakye’s previous record was set in May 2021, when her 2009 figurative work painting Diplomacy III sold for $1.95 million at Christie’s New York.

Meanwhile, the Phillips contemporary art evening sale brought in a respectable £18.3 million, a result that was about on par with last year’s. Records were set this time around for Marina Perez Simão and Francesca Mollett.

This sum seems paltry in comparison to similar auctions held by Christie’s and Sotheby’s this week. Then again, the latter’s marquee London auctions, which raked in £199 million ($252 million), were powered by Klimt’s Lady With a Fan (1917–18). That painting spurred a ten-minute bidding war and, at £85.3 million pounds with buyer’s fees ($108.4 million), became the most expensive work to ever sell at a European auction.

Yet Phillips’s sale never contained the same excitement. On Lot 15, Raft on a Siren Sea (2017) by Emily Mae Smith, auctioneer Henry Highley uttered the word “pass” for the first time. It wouldn’t be the last.

By the end of the 111-lot sale (it was originally 116—four lots were withdrawn before the sale began and one was withdrawn halfway though), Highly had said the word “pass” 18 times as lot after lot failed to reach its reserve price. Warhol, Banksy, and Kusama were among the artists whose works didn’t sell on Friday. Meanwhile, top lots like Lucio Fontana’s Concetto spaziale (1966–67), Sean Scully’s Wall Yellow Pale (2016), and Elizabeth Peyton’s Prince Harry, September 1998 (1998) hammered at below their low estimates. 

The £9.08 million ($11.5 million) evening had a sell through rate of only 84 percent.

One interesting feature of the sale was a tranche of works that came from the collection of Thomas B. Lemann, a New Orleans–based lawyer, autodidact, and art collector who passed away in February this year. This grouping, which was comprised of over 20 sculptures, stood out because the majority of the works came with no reserve. This made for a series of very unusual events for an evening sale: several of the works actually decreased in price. 

After auctioneer Louise Simpson took over the rostrum and works from the Lemann collection went up on the block, the pace began to quicken, with some works getting a surprising amount of attention, given the cool atmosphere during the first half of the sale. Tancredi Parmeggiani’s oil on canvas Quando Il Sole E’ Colorato (1958) inspired a flurry of bids, ultimately hammering for £95,000, or £120,650 with fees, after two Italians tried for over a full minute to outbid each other online. (Converted to dollars, that comes out $120,000, or $153,182 with fees.)

But by the time Bernard Meadows’s Seated Armed Figure (1962) came to the block, a hush had fallen over the sales floor and the phones. The screens announcing online bids went blank. This work, Lot 78, had an estimate of £8,000–£12,000. Bidding started at £4,000. For a time, Simpson’s voice was the only sound in the room. Then she lowered the price to £2,000. Still, no bids. She lowered the price again, to £1,000. Finally, an online bidder in Switzerland decided to bid £1,100. Another online bid came from Germany, and another from London. Seated Armed Figure eventually hammered for £1,700 (£2,159, or, with fees, $2,741).

This scenario repeated a few times, mpst shockingly with another work by Meadows, Two works: (i) Drawing for Sculpture (Fat Seated Figure); (ii) Drawing for Sculpture (Armed Bust Version 2), from 1962, which had an estimate of £700–£1,000. Bidding opened at £350 and dropped to £50 before the work sold for £100 to a bidder in the room. One wonders if Two Drawings could be the literal antithesis of Klimt’s record-breaking Lady with a Fan—the least expensive work ever to sell in a European evening auction.

After the Lemann collection, things on the sales floor normalized, though the last 30 or so lots had their share of passes and low bidding.

The sale did end on a high note, however. The final lot, Albert Willem’s marvelously titled All In All Not Bad For His First Attempt (2021) inspired three minutes of intense bidding headlined by online bidders in Poland and France, each one pushing the other, with the price shooting up in £5,000 increments until the work hammered for an astonishing £180,000 (£228,600, or $290,239 with fees) against an estimate of only £10,000–£15,000.

The “incredibly rare” discovery is “the most intact Roman mausoleum ever to be discovered in Britain,” boasting interior flooring and a “striking mosaic,” MOLA explained in a statement.

A total of 100 coins, pottery fragments, and roofing tiles were also uncovered at the site. While there were no coffins or human remains found, there were more than 80 Roman burials in the surrounding area. They included such objects as glass beads and copper bracelets.

The team believes that the wealthier Romans would have originally been buried inside the mausoleum.

“The rediscovery of this Roman mausoleum and mosaics is a testament to the rich tapestry of our past,” said Catherine Rose, a councilor for the London Borough of Southwark, in a statement.

Last year, the team found the largest Roman mosaic in more than 50 years at the site.

Offices, store, and homes will now be constructed on the site in Southwark, close to the south bank of the Thames River. Now that the excavation is complete, the mausoleum is slated to be restored and displayed for the public.

Sections of the two-mile wall that the Romans built 2,000 years ago to protect their British outpost, then called the Londinium, have been uncovered near the Thames river by archaeologists at the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA).

Digs in the area around the river began in the 1970s. Between 2006 and 2016, the museum uncovered three large sections totaling 330-feet near Riverbank House on Upper Thames Street, Sugar Quay, and Three Quays on Lower Thames Street. Now, even more of the wall has been found.

The wall segments, which were built from Kentish ragstone, were not the only discovery. Wooden wharfs and quays that date to 133 CE were also found during the excavations. The condition of the port structures shows how important the Londinium’s infrastructure was to a Britain under Roman rule.

These wall segments and the port structures were given “the highest level of heritage protection by England’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport,” according to Artnet News, and form the only remaining visible sections of the once 20-foot-high riverside wall along with a portion at the Tower of London.

“Even in a really dense city like London, built up over 2,000 years, there are still mysteries to be revealed right beneath our feet,” Duncan Wilson, chief executive of Historic England, told Artnet News. “The riverside wall remains an intriguing element of Roman London which raises almost as many questions as it answers.”

The study focuses on Monet and the British painter Joseph Mallord William Turner, both of whom were active during the Industrial Revolution, which saw steam engines and coal-powered manufacturing plants emit unprecedented amounts of smoke and soot into the air.

A group of researchers studied over 100 paintings by Turner and Monet trying to find empirical evidence that the dreamlike haze that has become a hallmark of Impressionist painting was in fact the artists interpretation of the polluted skies of London and Paris, the cities that both Turner and Monet found most inspiring.

“I work on air pollution and while seeing Turner, Whistler and Monet paintings at Tate in London and Musée d’Orsay in Paris, I noticed stylistic transformations in their works,” Anna Lea Albright, a postdoctoral researcher for Le Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique at Sorbonne University in Paris and coauthor of the study told CNN. “The contours of their paintings became hazier, the palette appeared wider, and the style changed from more figurative to more impressionistic: Those changes accord with physical expectations of how air pollution influences light.”

According to Albright, air pollution “makes objects appear hazier,” blurs their edges, and because pollution “reflects visible light of all wavelengths,” makes a scene appear whiter. The researchers studied both the hardness of edges and the amount of white in the paintings and compared them those metrics with estimates of air pollution at the time the paintings were executed, between 1796 and 1901.

“We found that there was a surprisingly good match,” Albright told CNN.

The study points out that there is a correlation that goes “beyond artistic evolution and style” because the paintings reflect the differences in the amount of air pollution in London and Paris, which were industrialized at different times. Further proof comes from Monet himself, who in 1901 wrote to his wife, bemoaning a day of bad weather and a lack of the smoke, trains, and boats that “excite the inspiration a little.”

“Turner and Monet are both artists who had to go to places to see certain conditions,” Jonathan Ribner, a professor of European art at Boston University, told CNN. Ribner described a phenomenon he calls “fog tourism” that brought French painters like Monet to London “deliberately to see the fog, because they loved the atmospheric effects.” Ribner was one of the first art histories to theorize that air pollution was an influence on both Monet and Turner.

Despite the evidence, there are some who refuse to believe that the birth of Impressionism can be pegged to ash and soot filling the skies. In the Washington Post, art critic Sebastian Smee railed against the study’s premise that pollution and not creativity explained the two artists’s “stylistic evolution.”

“I’m not arguing that there is no credence to the already well-established idea that Monet was responding to an increasingly polluted environment,” Smee wrote, “I’m just arguing that this latest study’s way of making the case is so full of holes that it strikes me as worthless.”

The specter of a recession is still looming in the US, and this sort of foreboding future tends to dampen the mood at auctions. The Christie’s salesroom thrummed with a calm buzz, however, and dealers Danny Nahmad and Danny Katz were among those present.

In total, 106 lots sold to buyers; three lots were withdrawn ahead of the sale. Twenty-seven works in the sales, including paintings by Marc Chagall, Cecily Brown, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, were offered with financial guarantees. Meanwhile, a total of six artists records were set.

Last year, an equivalent sale staged in Shanghai and London generated £249 million ($334 million) with buyer’s fees. This year’s result showed a drop by more than 30 percent.

Leading the sale was a work by Pablo Picasso, whose life and work are this year being revisited on the 50th anniversary of his death. Femme dans un rocking-chair (Jacqueline), 1956, was offered with a low estimate of £15 million ($18 million). In fashion typical for the top lots in UK evening sales, the work hammered below its expectation at £14.5 million ($17.4 million) after one bid fielded by the London-based Impressionist and modern art specialist Giovanna Bertazzoni.

Contemporary artists with rising markets injected some energy into the sale. The London-based painter Michaela Yearwood-Dan’s work has ascended rapidly on the market, and at Christie’s on Tuesday, her Love me nots (2021), a pink-hued canvas scrawled with treacly phrases like “Will you still love me tomorrow,” sold for £730,800 ($878,260) with fees. A bidder on the phone with Christie’s London-based specialist Tessa Lord won the work.

The sum brought for Love me nots was 18 times its low estimate of £40,000 ($48,000). It was the third time the artist’s record was re-set in recent months.

Other artists with established audiences in the UK surpassed expectations. Scottish-born painter Caroline Walker’s was represented by The Puppeteer (2013), featuring three bathing-suit clad women; after attracting seven bids, the work sold for £693,000 with fees, more than four times the £150,000 ($180,000) estimate. Claire Tabouret’s 2014 canvas Les débutantes (blanc lunaire) (The debutantes (moon white), which depicts a group of identical girls in white dresses, realized £529,200 ($636,000) with fees. The result was double its high estimate.

Some works, including Vincent van Gogh’s Kop van een vrouw (Gordina de Groot) (Head of a Woman), came to auction for the first time at the sale.

The van Gogh surpassed its £2 million estimate two times over, hammering at £4 million ($4.8 million). It had come to auction after more than a century owned by a Swiss banking family, and was produced around the time that van Gogh was accused of having fathered a child the painting’s titular subject. (Van Gogh denied this during his lifetime.)

Paintings by Paul Cézanne and David Hockney also made their auction debuts here, selling for prices around £4 million and £7 million ($4.8 and $8.4 million), respectively.

Highlighting the Surrealist section of the London event was a group of works from a West Coast collection. Artnet reported that the sellers of these 25 works were Gary and Kathie Heidenreich.

Óscar Domínguez’s macabre scene of a hooded nude woman, titled Machine à coudre électro-sexuelle (1934–35), sold for £4.6 million, setting a record for the Spanish artist. Remedios Varo, the subject of current retrospective in Buenos Aires that is set to travel to the Art Institute of Chicago, attracted attention in the sale. Her 1957 canvas Retrato del Doctor Ignacio Chávez sold for £3.9 million ($4.8 million), going above its high estimate.Her Surrealist peer Leonora Carrington’s painting Lepidoptera went for £460,000 ($553,058), nearly double its high estimate. 

One artist less visible in the London art scene drew attention: the Chinese painter Liu Ye, who hasn’t had a solo show in the British capital in more than 20 years, even though he has widespread international recognition.

Liu’s painting The Goddess, a portrait of a woman smoking, hammered at £3.2 million. The result surpassed the expectation of £800,000 ($961,040) and went to a bidder on the phone with Christie’s Hong Kong–based specialist Elaine Holt. Meanwhile, a 2019 canvas by Shara Hughes, titled Rough Terrain, went for £630,000 with fees. A Singapore bidder was its buyer.

These were two of the rare moments when Asian buyers were in the spotlight at these sales. According to Christie’s, the Asia-Pacific region accounted for just 13 percent of bids placed during the two auctions.

The cache of pop music history ephemera includes handwritten lyrics, personal letters, musical instruments and, most important, costumes. These objects will be housed in the forthcoming David Bowie Center for the Study of Performing Arts in east London’s Olympic Park, which is due to open in 2025.

The collection includes the Freddie Burretti–designed jumpsuit worn by Bowie when he became Ziggy Stardust, the Union Jack coat Bowie wore on the cover of his 1997 record Earthling (designed by Bowie and Alexander McQueen), and handwritten lyrics to what is arguably his greatest tune, “Heroes.” 

The archive includes more than 70,000 photos and images. Alongside it, the museum received a $12 million donation from the Blavatnik Family Foundation and Warner Music Group to house the center at V&A East Storehouse, an offshoot of the UK’s national museum of art, design, and performance.

“Bowie’s radical innovations across music, theatre, film, fashion, and style—from Berlin to Tokyo to London—continue to influence design and visual culture and inspire creatives from Janelle Monáe to Lady Gaga to Tilda Swinton and Raf Simons,” V&A director Tristram Hunt, who called Bowie “one of the greatest musicians and performers of all time” told the AP.

Bowie, an artistic chimera who covered musical terrain from glam to folk to electronica, was influenced by everything from German Expressionist cinema to Japanese Kabuki theater to The Beatles. He died at age 69 of liver cancer in 2016, two days after the release of his 26th and final studio album, Blackstar.