Joe Lewis's £150m art collection heads to Sotheby's
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- Sotheby's will auction the Lewis Collection in London in June, a group of works by Klimt, Schiele, Modigliani, Bacon, Matisse, Soutine, Freud and Caillebotte expected to realise more than £150m and, combined with other June sales, make it the highest-value week of auctions ever staged in the city.
- Joe Lewis and his daughter Vivienne — whose family owns Tottenham Hotspur — consigned the works; Lewis grew up in London's East End, where he developed a passion for the School of London painters that became the foundation of one of the world's most significant private collections of modern figurative art.
- Klimt's 1902 full-length society portrait Bildnis Gertrud Loew (Gertha Felsőványi), stolen by the Nazis from its Viennese patron and later displayed at New York's Neue Galerie, leads the sale at an estimated £20-30m; Sotheby's notes only five major Klimt portraits have come to auction in the past 25 years, each exceeding its top estimate.
- Schiele's Danaë, painted when the artist was 19, is estimated at £12-18m and would break the auction record for a Schiele work, while Modigliani's Homme à la pipe (Le notaire de Nice) — unseen for almost half a century — carries the same £12-18m estimate.
- Bacon's 1977 rare double self-portrait is estimated at £8-12m, and highlights will tour to New York and London before the June sale.
- A March Sotheby's sale of four School of London works from the Lewis Collection already made £35.8m — double their combined low estimate — and the June auction follows last September's Pauline Karpidas sale, which set the prior London single-owner record at £101m.
- Oliver Barker, Sotheby's Europe chair, called the collection a rare 'concentration of museum-calibre masterpieces' and described the auction as 'one for the history books,' framing the September Karpidas sale as a 'turning point' that revived confidence in the global art market.
Why it matters: If the collection meets its £150m+ projection, it will surpass the £101m Pauline Karpidas sale from September to become the most valuable collection ever offered in London and the highest-value week of auctions ever staged in the city — a concrete benchmark shift for Sotheby's and the broader art market after a period of softened confidence. The consigner, Joe Lewis, is selling museum-grade works that have not been on the market for decades, giving collectors a rare shot at a single coherent, figurative-art-focused collection.
