Sotheby’s closed its June series in London with £420.5 million ($556.5 million) across four sales, the highest total for any auction season ever staged in Europe. The scale of the result is less striking than its shape: a single private collection supplied nearly three quarters of it, and buyers from Asia set the pace at the very top of the market.
The engine of the week was Masterpieces from the Lewis Collection. The 47 works sold across the series realised £306.6 million ($406.2 million), the highest total for any single-owner sale ever held in London. Added to the £35.8 million taken for four School of London works from the same collection in March, the Lewis material alone now accounts for £342.4 million at Sotheby’s London this year. When one estate can move figures on that scale, a record season total says as much about supply as about demand.
At the top of the collection was Amedeo Modigliani’s Nu assis au collier, which sold for £48.2 million ($63.9 million), the highest price for the artist at auction in Europe. A second Modigliani painted in the South of France, Homme à la pipe (Le Notaire de Nice), added £23.3 million. The two evening sales together made £393.4 million ($520.7 million), the highest total ever achieved in a single night at auction in Europe, with ten works selling above £10 million and a new auction record set for a work on paper by Magritte.
The clearest signal of the week was where the bidding came from. Collectors from 45 countries took part, but Asian buyers accounted for more than a third of the value of the Lewis evening sale, above £120 million, and competed for half of the lots on offer, including every one of the top ten. Sustained participation from the region at the most expensive end of a European sale is the number worth watching.
Demand was not confined to the trophies. In the Modern day auction, which took £17.8 million and beat its high estimate by close to 20 percent, Picasso’s Portrait de Dora Maar doubled its low estimate at £1.3 million, a Monet portrait sold for more than five times its high estimate, and Matisse’s Autoportrait made almost five times its high estimate. The contemporary day sale added a further £9.3 million, with more than half of its lots clearing their high estimates. Even the week’s one notable casualty resolved itself: Degas’s pastel La Loge failed to sell in the room but found a private buyer soon after, leaving the entire Lewis Collection sold.
At an overall sell-through of 84 percent, the week reads as a market that is strong but selective, and one that increasingly leans on marquee single-owner material and deep-pocketed Asian demand to reach its highest totals. London’s June sales, long the anchor of the European calendar, still convene that money.
(Press Release)
