With apologies for the headline, provenance sells no matter how clichéd. The Gunther Sachs sale made $56.3m at Sotheby’s.

Bloomberg’s Scott Reyburn caught the bidding in London where Jose Mugrabi nabbed a Warhol flowers, missed out on a bunch of other stuff, including the Allen Jones furniture that went nuts:

• “I remember when a set of these came up for auction in the early 1980s,” Mugrabi said in an interview. “They sold for about $15,000. I thought they were too vulgar then. Taste evolves and they now appeal to the new generation of collectors.”

• “The Bardot was the bargain of the night,” the Montreal- based collector Francois Odermatt said in an interview. “We shouldn’t judge Sachs’s taste just from this sale. The family has kept a lot of the best pieces. After these results, they might do a Gunter Sachs II auction.”

Warhol Bardot, Self Portrait Boost $56 Million Sachs Sale (Bloomberg)