What to Watch in Sotheby’s Masterpieces From the Lewis Collection Sale |
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What to Watch in Sotheby’s Masterpieces From the Lewis Collection Sale
While billionaire Joe Lewis, now 89, is letting go of quite a few works, he and his family say they are not hitting pause on collecting.
British billionaire Joe Lewis made his fortune in currency trading and went on to own the Tottenham Hotspur football club and a string of other enterprises. He purportedly approaches collecting with the same selectivity and market focus as he approached business, while also finding inspiration in his early encounters with art. “Lewis grew up amid the creative ferment of post-war London, the city of Bacon, Freud and Kossoff, where the School of London first ignited his passion as a collector,” Sotheby’s chairman Oliver Barker said in a statement. That passion eventually matured into an interest in figuration, specifically, and he built “one of the world’s most important private collections of Modern art.”
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Over roughly 25 years, Lewis and his daughter Vivienne assembled a museum-quality trove of modern figurative painting, acquiring works by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Amedeo Modigliani, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Gustave Caillebotte, Chaïm Soutine and Pablo Picasso, among others. In June, major works from that collection are headed to Sotheby’s in London in the Masterpieces From the Lewis Collection auction, which could become the most valuable single-owner sale ever held in the U.K.
Notably, while Lewis is letting go of quite a few works, he and his family are not hitting pause on collecting. “While this public sale represents a significant staging post, our journey as collectors is far from over—we remain committed to the avant-garde painters of today, much of whose work is informed by the artists showcased here,” a spokesperson for the Lewis Collection said in a........