Joe Lewis’s art collection is heading to Sotheby’s London in a sale that could reset the UK market
A tranche of British billionaire Joe Lewis’s collection will come to Sotheby’s in London this June, with an estimated value of £150 million to £200 million. If it reaches the top of that range, the auction would become the most valuable single-owner collection ever sold in the UK, surpassing the Pauline Karpidas sale at Sotheby’s last September, which totaled £101 million with fees.
The June offering follows a smaller March sale of four Lewis works at Sotheby’s that brought £35.8 million with fees. That group, drawn from the School of London, included works by Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff — a segment Sotheby’s vice chairman Oliver Barker described as central to the collection’s identity. The new sale widens the lens considerably. Barker called it a “global checklist” of major names from the last 150 years, including Freud, Amedeo Modigliani, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Gustave Caillebotte, Chaïm Soutine, Pablo Picasso and Bacon.
Among the announced highlights are Klimt’s 1902 society portrait “Bildnis Gertrud Loew,” estimated at £20 million to £30 million; Modigliani’s “Homme à la pipe (Le notaire de Nice),” estimated at £12 million to £18 million; Bacon’s “Two Studies for Self-Portrait” from 1977, estimated at £8 million to £12 million; Picasso’s 1936 drawing of Dora Maar, estimated at £600,000 to £800,000; Soutine’s “Portrait de garçon en bleu,” estimated at £1.8 million to £2.5 million; and Freud’s “Woman in a Grey Sweater,” estimated at £3 million to £4 million.
One of the most closely watched lots is Schiele’s “Danaë,” painted in 1909 when the artist was 19. The work was withdrawn from a Sotheby’s New York sale in May 2017, when it had been estimated at $30 million to $40 million. It now returns with a lower estimate of £12 million to £18 million, or about $16.1 million to $24.2 million.
A selection of the works will be shown at Sotheby’s New York on May 2, with additional lots to be announced before the London sale later in June. Lewis and his daughter Vivienne assembled the collection over decades, largely between the early 1990s and about 2015. A family spokesperson said the March results affirmed “the enduring power of figurative painting,” while also stressing that the family remains committed to contemporary artists.
The choice of London is as significant as the works themselves. In a market often described as weakened since Brexit, Sotheby’s is framing the sale as a deliberate vote of confidence in the city. Barker called it an “injection of trust” in London — and, given the scale of the collection, a test of how much force the capital still carries in the global auction calendar.
