Billionaire Joe Lewis's auction, former owner of Tottenham Hotspur, has become the sale of a single most valuable collector ever held in the UK. According to The Art NewspaperLewis' lots amounted to £249.3 million in hammer, or £296.3 million with fees included.
The full session of the evening, which combined Lewis' lots to a wider auction of modern and contemporary art, grossed £393.4 million with fees, beating Sotheby’s own record for this type of event in London and becoming the largest sum ever achieved on a single auction night in Europe.
Result almost triples previous British record
The total night nearly tripled the previous British record of £101 million, set by Pauline Karpidas' collection in September last year. The difference illustrates the magnitude of the market appetite for works of solid provenance and museum quality gathered in a single collection.
The most valuable lot of the session was “Nu assis au collie”, 1917, Amedeo Modigliani, sold in a single bid for £41.5 million in hammer, or £48.2 million with fees. The second largest result came from “Bildnis Gertrud Loew”, portrait of 1902 painted by Gustav Klimt, cast for £36.2 million by a private Asian collector.
Joe Lewis built fortune mainly as an investor and operator in the exchange market, ahead of the Tavistock Group, conglomerate with participation in more than 200 companies in 15 countries. Over the decades, it has gathered an estimated art collection of $1 billion, with works of names like Picasso, Matisse, Lucian Freud and sculptor Henry Moore. In 2018, he had already sold David Hockney’s “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” for $90,3 million in auction at Christie’s, a transaction that at the time became the most expensive ever paid for by a living artist.
Asian buyers dominate a relevant part of the auction
Asian collectors bid in half of the 25 lots offered during the session and accounted for about a third of the total amount cast off, reinforcing the increasing weight of this public in the international art auction market of the highest standard.
This Asian role has become a constant in recent European auctions, as new collectors in the region actively seek historical masterpieces as a form of heritage diversification and cultural prestige building.
What the result signals for the luxury art market
Sales performance reinforces that the high standard art auction market remains resilient, even in a more cautious global economic scenario, provided that the works offered have impeccable origin and internationally recognized quality. These two factors remain the main determinants of value in auctions of this magnitude.
The importance of documented origin, moreover, is an increasingly central theme in the art market, as recently discussed in the debate on the Irish proposal to create a national panel to evaluate works plundered by Nazism and colonialism, which reinforces how property history directly impacts the value and legal certainty of a piece.
