Sotheby’s has revealed the full contents of Masterpieces from the Lewis Collection, to be exhibited at its London galleries from 10 to 23 June ahead of the June sales. The forty-eight works carry an estimate in excess of £200 million, the highest estimate for any single-owner collection ever offered at auction in Europe.
The offering is led by a nude by Amedeo Modigliani, Nu assis au collier (1917 to 18, estimated in excess of £45 million), which ranks among the most important examples of the artist’s work ever to come to market. Painted in 1917, it belongs to the series shown at Berthe Weill’s gallery in Paris, an exhibition closed by police on its opening day. Modigliani is one of a small group of artists to have broken the $100 million threshold at auction, and has done so twice, both times in New York for works from this series; the two highest-achieving works by the artist, both titled Nu couché, were painted in the same year and sold for $170.4 million and $157.2 million in 2015 and 2018. Last offered at auction in 1995 and unseen in Europe since 1938, Nu assis au collier represents the highest value work by Modigliani ever offered in Europe. It has previously been exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among others.
A further star work is Edgar Degas’ Petite danseuse de quatorze ans (est. £18 million to £25 million), conceived in wax circa 1879 to 81 and cast in bronze from 1922. The sculpture depicts Marie van Goethem, a ballet student at the Paris Opéra. When the wax model was first seen in Paris in 1881 during the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition, audiences were shocked by its realism; one critic asked “ Can art descend any lower?” It was the only sculpture Degas exhibited during his lifetime. Of the 27 casts produced, the vast majority now reside in international museums, and aside from this example only four others have ever appeared at auction. The wax model is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., part of the Mellon collection.
The collection also includes a suite of seven works by Pablo Picasso spanning eight decades of his career, led by Buste de femme (1938, oil on paper laid down on canvas, est. £12 million to £18 million), a portrait of Dora Maar unseen in public for over half a century. In contrast to Picasso’s later distortions of Dora’s features, the work ranks as one of his more reverent portrayals. Maar, a photographer closely associated with the Surrealist movement, first met Picasso early in 1936 and assisted with the execution of Guernica. It is presented alongside Tête de femme (est. £2 million to £3 million), a monumental work on paper from 1921 depicting Picasso’s first wife Olga Khokhlova from his Neoclassical period, and one of the earliest fully realised portraits by the artist ever to come to market, painted when he was just seventeen.
Also in the June sale is Lucian Freud’s Sleeping by the Lion Carpet (est. £25 million to £35 million), the final and most ambitious of his four portraits of ‘benefits supervisor’ Sue Tilley, and Degas’ La Loge, a pastel completed in 1880 (est. £3 million to £4 million). These are joined by newly revealed works by René Magritte, Henri Matisse and Max Beckmann, and offered alongside Gustav Klimt’s Bildnis Gertrud Loew (Gertha Felsőványi), Egon Schiele’s Danaë, Gustave Caillebotte’s Portrait de Paul Hugot, Francis Bacon’s Two Studies for Self-Portrait, and works by Chaïm Soutine.
(Press Release)
