London has spent much of the past year watching New York dominate the auction market with a succession of blockbuster single-owner collections. On Wednesday evening, however, the British capital staged a reminder of its own pulling power.
Sotheby’s sale of works from the collection of billionaire financier and former Tottenham Hotspur Football Club owner Joe Lewis racked up £249.3m, which comes to £296.3m with fees, making it the most valuable single-owner collection ever sold in the UK, and one of the strongest auction results globally this year.
The total nearly tripled the previous British record of £101m, set by the collection of Pauline Karpidas last September, and provided a particularly bright spot for a London market that has struggled to shake off concerns over Brexit, taxation and competition from New York, Hong Kong and even Paris.
Assembled over almost half a century by Lewis and his daughter Vivienne, the collection offered a stellar survey of European Modernism and post-war figuration, spanning artists from Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Amedeo Modigliani to Pablo Picasso and Lucian Freud. Estimated between £150m to £200m (all estimates calculated without fees), the sale vaulted over expectations, though the often slow, deliberate bidding suggested that even the market’s wealthiest collectors remain discerning at the highest price levels. None of the works were guaranteed.
The sale also underscored the continuing importance of Asian buyers to the upper-end of the art market. Collectors from the region bid on half of the 25 lots offered and accounted for around a third of the auction’s total, according to Sotheby’s. Several of the evening’s highest-value works were secured by bidders represented by the auction house’s Asia chairman Wendy Lin, including Klimt’s Bildnis Gertrud Loew (Gertha Felsőványi, 1902), which sold for £31m (£36.2m with fees) against an estimate of £20m to £30m.
Klimt’s Bildnis Gertrud Loew (Gertha Felsőványi, 1902)
Courtesy of Sotheby’s
“Overall, last night felt pretty epic,” says Clare Keiller, the director of research at the London art advisory firm Beaumont Nathan. “We are seeing the return of people to the salesrooms in London. Asian bidding is back—we also saw that in New York [in May]—and that has made a big difference.”
If the £296.3m total suggested newfound buoyancy in the London market, the bidding told a more nuanced story, with a pace that felt more measured than frenetic. What was scheduled as a one-hour auction stretched to nearly two, with the first two lots alone racking up almost 20 minutes.
Nonetheless, the figures are incontestable. The first lot, a portrait of Paul Hugot by Gustave Caillebotte, sailed over its estimate of £3.5m to £4.5m to hammer for £8.5m (£10.3m with fees). Deep bidding pushed up the second: René Magritte’s La Belle promenade, a work on paper which soared to £13.5m (£16m with fees) against expectations of £3m-£4m. Last sold at Christie’s in 2014 for £2.2m, the sale represented an annualised return of 15%.
More than half the work sold beyond their top estimates. “Estimates were largely pretty well considered, I don’t think they felt pushed,” Keiller says. “With the market still being quite price sensitive, that really does make a difference.” For example, judicious pricing helped eke out a very small return for Picasso’s Baigneuses, sirènes, femme nue et minotaure (1937), which the Lewis’s purchased at Christie’s in 2020 for £6.4m with fees. It was offered last night for £3.5m to £4.5m, realising £5.7m, or £7m with fees.
An even bigger price correction came courtesy of Egon Schiele’s precocious Danaë (1909), painted when the artist was just 19 and which returned to the block nine years after being withdrawn from a Sotheby’s New York sale carrying a $30m to $40m estimate. This time, with expectations reset to £12m to £18m, it sold for £15.2m (£17.9m with fees) after a protracted battle between Wendy Lin and Fahad Malloh, the firm’s Saudi-based director of business strategy, who eventually won the picture.
Modigliani’s 1917 Nu assis au collie
Courtesy of Sotheby’s
The top price of the sale came from Modigliani’s 1917 Nu assis au collie, a painting so scandalous it caused an exhibition to be shut down when it was shown in Paris the year it was painted. Lewis bought it in 1995 for $12.4m; last night it sold on a single bid for £41.5m (£48.2m with fees) to Sotheby’s senior specialist in Europe and Asia, Simon Stock, having been priced “in excess” of £45m.
Another hotly anticipated lot, Lucian Freud’s Sleeping by the Lion Carpet (1995-96)—described by the critic Martin Gayford as “the best painting Freud ever painted”—sold at its £25m low estimate, or £29.3m with fees.
The auction also marks a changing of the guard. Lewis, 89, built the collection with his daughter Vivienne over almost five decades, acquiring works that chart many of the defining moments of Modern art. Yet Sotheby’s insists the sale should not be interpreted as an exit from the art world, more a shift in tastes, with Vivienne Lewis remaining an active buyer.
And the results seem to disprove the narrative that a younger generation of collector are not interested in the post-war and Impressionist art purchased by their predecessors. “With the market having had a few setbacks over the past few years, there has been a flight to quality and more blue-chip tastes,” Keiller points out. “And that is coinciding with the Great Wealth Transfer, which was predicted to go one way but has shifted back a little bit.”
That sentiment was also borne out by last night’s evening sale, which fetched £97.1m. Nearly half of that total came from a single picture: Claude Monet’s, Nymphéas (1907), which sold for £35m (£40.8m with fees), becoming the most valuable Impressionist work sold at auction in Europe in over a decade.
Rather than abandoning established categories, it seems today’s collectors appear willing to pay a premium for the rarest and most sought-after examples. Crucially, for London, last night’s sales offered a timely demonstration that the city can still compete for the global art market’s most valuable consignments.
