23 May 2012 Last updated at 07:08 ET

Gunter Sachs' art sells for £35m

Andy Warhol's Brigitte Bardot painting sold for just over £3m

Art owned by Gunter Sachs, the late German billionaire playboy and former husband of Brigitte Bardot, has been sold for £35.6m at auction in London.

The top lot was one of Andy Warhol's last self-portraits, which went under the hammer at Sotheby's for £5.4m.

Sachs, who took his own life last year aged 78, was married to French actress Bardot for three years in the 1960s.

A Warhol portrait of her, commissioned by Sachs five years after the couple divorced, sold for just over £3m.

Allen Jones' glass-topped mannequin table sold for £971,000

Following heated bidding, a complete set of furniture made by pop artist Allen Jones, including a table, chair and hatstand made from female mannequins in leather outfits, fetched £4.1m, some 20 times the pre-auction estimate.

Warhol's portrait of Sachs himself fetched £1.3m, while the artist's 1964 work The Kiss (Bela Lugosi) was bought for £3.2m, a record for a Warhol work on paper.

Sachs and Bardot married in Las Vegas in 1966, a few weeks after they first met.

Hours after meeting her, the billionaire famously arranged for a helicopter to fly over her house in southern France to drop hundreds of red roses.

In 1972, Sachs put on Warhol's first major European exhibition at his Hamburg gallery.

When there were few buyers, he spared the American's blushes by secretly purchasing half the works himself.

Sachs took his life at his Swiss chalet a year ago, explaining in a suicide note it was due to "no hope illness A" - believed to be a reference to be Alzheimer's.

Bardot, now 77, said she was "devastated" to hear of his death.