Sotheby’s Opens the London Spring Marquee Sales With a £131M White-Glove Night
Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon from the Joe Lewis collection displayed behind the podium." width="970" height="647" data-caption='Sotheby’s London Modern & Contemporary Evening Sale on March 4 closed with a £131 million total. <span class="media-credit">Sotheby's</span>'>
After the ebullient multi-billion-dollar New York auctions in November, all eyes turned to London this week to gauge what the market might do amid rising global tensions now erupting into open conflict. Since the beginning of the year, the news cycle has offered little respite, and the auction week headlines have hardly been reassuring. Just days before the sales, the United States and Israel struck Iran, prompting retaliatory attacks across the Gulf, the killing of Supreme Leader Khamenei and an unfolding regional crisis that immediately sent markets into shock.
Still, despite the world appearing to unravel all around it, Sotheby’s managed to deliver a successful opening performance last night in London, achieving a £131 million ($176 million) total against an estimate of £95,650,000-135,700,000 and closing with white gloves. The 100 percent sell-through across the sale’s 54 lots, however, came only after one withdrawn lot and the successful reopening of bidding on Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Thin in the Old (1986), which initially went unsold when bidding stalled at a £4.4 million last phone bid before returning a few lots later to sell for £3.7 million after the reserve had likely been renegotiated.
The evening opened with a luminous, bright yellow Joseph Albers study for Homage to the Square, which from its £300,000 starting bid quickly climbed to a £650,000 hammer in the room, finishing at £832,000 with fees. Both Warhols that followed delivered strong results. One of his iconic dollar signs—once exhibited by Leo Castelli—almost doubled its low estimate, closing at £576,000 with fees after being pursued by six bidders, while his equally iconic Flowers from 1964 hammered at £1.4 million against its £800,000-1 million estimate, reaching £1,792,000 with fees. The result places it among the 10 highest prices achieved for a Warhol Flowers at auction since 2022. The work was shown in Galerie Burén’s 1965 exhibition dedicated to the series and had previously appeared at Sotheby’s London in 2006, when it was acquired by the consignor for $731,200.
The sale’s rhythm briefly faltered with Magritte’s gouache L’Automate, which hammered below estimate at £750,000, finishing at £960,000 with fees. Next came an immaculate and rare Achrome by Piero Manzoni, which hammered on the phone with Italian art specialist and Sotheby’s Italy chairman Claudia Dweck for £400,000 (£512,000 with fees). Still, the work had been acquired by the consignor in 2007 from Sotheby’s single-owner Verheyen collection sale in Milan for a significantly higher €988,200.
Momentum returned with another Warhol icon, Four Marilyns (Reversal Series) from 1986, which hammered at its high estimate to sell for £3.3 million with fees. A sculpture by Antony Gormley was closely chased by multiple bidders, closing above its high estimate at £435,200, as did the black Soulages before it, which landed at £614,400 with fees.
Making its first auction appearance in more than three decades, Edvard Munch’s landscape, Houses in Kragerø, just met its estimate to sell for £1,664,000. The lot that followed—Claude Monet’s highly anticipated Maison de jardinier, painted on the Italian Riviera in early 1884—also landed within expectations, hammering at £6.7 million and reaching £8,215,000 with fees, still below its £8.5 million high estimate despite its exceptional provenance. The painting was first acquired from the artist’s dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, by John Singer Sargent and remained with him until the dispersal of his estate in 1925, after which it passed through a series of pioneering female collectors in the United States. The current consignor purchased it at Sotheby’s London in February 2007, when it achieved $7.9 million with premium against a $3.5 million high estimate.
Much greater excitement followed with one of Brancusi’s posthumous casts of the iconic Une Muse, dated 1972, which exceeded its estimate after fees, selling for £3.6 million. After that came a more subdued sequence, including Sean Scully’s abstraction selling within estimate at £768,000 and a tapestry by El Anatsui—one of the few living artists in the sale—hammering below estimate to reach £742,400.
Attention then turned to one of the most highly anticipated consignments of the evening: a magnificent quartet of London School masterworks from the collection of Joe Lewis, which alone generated £35.8 million against a combined estimate of £18.6-26.8 million. Opening the group was Leon Kossoff’s Children’s Swimming Pool, 11 o’clock Saturday Morning, August, which climbed to a record-setting £5,214,000 from a far more modest £600,000-800,000 estimate after a five-minute battle between 10 bidders. The first Swimming Pool painting to appear at auction since 2001, it sold for 25 times the price it achieved at auction in 1992 (£209,000). Kossoff had long benefited from strong institutional and gallery support in the United States. By the 1980s, he was represented by L.A. Louver Gallery, and his work had entered major museum collections in California and New York, reinforcing a transatlantic presence that continues to resonate with collectors.
Next came Lucian Freud’s portrait of a young painter, which hammered on the phone for £5.8 million after more than five minutes of bidding, finishing at £7.2 million with fees. Portraying the artist Ken Brazier, the painting marked a turning point in Freud’s practice, as he began moving away from a more linear, academic style toward a looser, tactile handling of paint that would intensify the psychological presence of his sitters.
Even more spectacle followed with Francis Bacon’s Self-Portrait, the only 1972 self-portrait to come to auction in the past 30 years, since it last sold at Sotheby’s in 1994 for £330,000 from the collection of Paul Brass, the doctor to whom Bacon had gifted the work after he assisted him through some of his darkest nights. This time the painting hammered on the phone at £13.5 million, reaching £16,035,000 with fees and surpassing its £8-12 million estimate. Last in the quartet was Lucian Freud’s nude Blond Girl on a Bed (1987). Despite being a fresh-to-market example of one of the artist’s most commercially and critically admired subjects, it sold rather straightforwardly on the phone for £7,410,000, with no guarantee.
What followed was a largely successful sequence of lots selling within or above estimate, with the brief moment of uncertainty around the Basquiat piece quickly resolved through the reopened bidding.
Among the notable moments was David Hockney’s English Garden, the artist’s first fully realized English landscape, which reached £1.5 million at the hammer and £1,920,000 with fees—far above the £90,000 it achieved when it last appeared at auction in 1997, underscoring the artist’s considerable market appreciation following recent institutional attention. The painting was shown at Kasmin Gallery in 1965 and at Galleria dell’Ariete in Milan in 1966, later appearing in the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s 1970 Hockney survey. It most recently resurfaced in the exhibition catalogue for the artist’s major 2025 retrospective at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, an institutional endorsement that has further strengthened his market.
Both the Bridget Riley and the Lucio Fontana that followed sold within estimate, at £832,000 and £1,792,000, respectively. Notably, the gold-surface slash by Fontana was one of only five unprimed tagli works ever offered on the secondary market.
Among the Modern highlights, Alberto Giacometti’s Femme debout climbed from its £1.4 million opening bid to £5,092,000 with fees, more than doubling its £2.2-2.8 million estimate after a sustained contest between seven bidders. The cast had never previously appeared at auction, having remained in the same private collection for more than 60 years. Another highlight, Paul Signac’s Marseille. Le Port landed at its low estimate with a £4 million hammer (£4,378,519 with fees), while Edgar Degas’s Scene de ballet hammered just above its low estimate at £2.55 million, reaching £3,201,000 with fees. And a few lots later, a recently rediscovered work by Vilhelm Hammershøi hammered on the phone for £1.4 million, reaching £1,792,000 with fees and just above its £1.5 million estimate. A painting by Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes opened at £410,000 and quickly sold for £450,000 (£576,000 with fees), despite the recent museum attention surrounding the artist.
Toward the end of the sale, the monumental Dame Barbara Hepworth sculpture Three Obliques (Walk In) rapidly climbed from a £2 million opening bid to £4,701,020 with fees, despite its imposing three-meter height. Described as one of Hepworth’s most impressive bronzes and among her largest works not made for a public commission, the cast had remained in the same private collection since it sold at Sotheby’s New York in 2006. Anselm Kiefer’s Für Velimir Chlebnikov: Lehre vom Krieg: Seeschlachten (Lot 49) also more than doubled its £600,000 high estimate, fetching £1.4 million with fees. Overall, Sotheby’s solid, carefully staged performance suggests that renewed market confidence is holding despite the turbulence unfolding beyond the saleroom. After all, the art world has always followed its own logic, even during—or perhaps especially during—the worst crises.
Next up is Christie’s 20th / 21st Century: London Evening Sale, which takes up the baton tonight, March 5, at 6 p.m. GMT.
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