Post-Basel, the June London auctions are the final market temperature check before the art world jets off to slower summer destinations. Following New York’s May marquee auction week, led this year by multimillion-dollar collections, and a vibrant London Gallery Weekend, Sotheby’s and Christie’s are bringing top consignments to their summer sales in a city that is arguably still the world’s second-biggest art market hub.
Sotheby’s, in particular, is expected to sell around £297-427 million of art in what is shaping up to be its strongest June session ever, led by an estimated £89-127 million Modern & Contemporary sale and the Lewis Collection—a spectacular trove of 48 modern and contemporary masterpieces with a total estimate in excess of £200 million. “London is a great magnet for international collectors, and this season captures that energy in a remarkable way,” Sotheby’s chairman Helena Newman told Observer. “The depth of material we are seeing, and the decision by so many collectors to bring their most important works here, speaks to the market’s enduring confidence in London as a global stage.”
While Christie’s has modified its London calendar, now holding its marquee 20th/21st Century sales in October and March, its reimagined London Summer Season still celebrates the city’s dynamism and creativity. This year, the house will stage its Post-War to Contemporary Art auction, preceded by a dedicated sale of top contemporary works from the legendary Zabludowicz Collection, most of them fresh to the secondary market and carrying a combined total value of around $15 million. What follows is a roundup of the lots worth watching across the major houses’ London auctions.
The Lewis Collection at Sotheby’s
Live on June 24. Estimate in excess of £200 million.
Assembled over decades by Joe Lewis and his daughter Vivienne, the Lewis Collection is one of those museum-grade consignments that can make an entire season. The British billionaire and art collector made his fortune in currency trading and went on to own the Tottenham Hotspur football club and a string of other enterprises, eventually taking to collecting with the same selectivity he brought to business. He, after all, grew up amid the creative ferment of postwar London, where the School of London first ignited his passion for collecting.
The Lewis Collection had already made news earlier this year, when a quartet of major works consigned to Sotheby’s for the London marquee sales in March generated £35.8 million against an estimate of £18.6-26.8 million. Leading that exceptional quartet was Francis Bacon’s 1972 self-portrait, painted in the shadow of devastating personal loss following the death of his lover George Dyer, which sold for £16 million, surpassing its £8-12 million estimate.
Preceding its Modern & Contemporary sale, Sotheby’s is staging a dedicated single-owner sale, Masterpieces from the Lewis Collection, featuring many works that have been exhibited or loaned to major museums. In total, the collection is expected to bring Sotheby’s a result in the region of £180 million (about $250 million), which would make it by far the most valuable collection ever sold in London, surpassing the already stellar result achieved by the Pauline Karpidas sale last September, which totaled £101 million with fees, and move closer to the most valuable collection ever offered at auction in Europe, the Collection of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, which generated €373.9 million (roughly £332.8 million/$483.8 million) when it was auctioned at Christie’s Paris in February 2009.
The 48-lot group is led by Amedeo Modigliani’s Nu assis au collier, offered with an estimate in excess of £45 million and unseen for almost half a century. Described by Sotheby’s as one of the greatest works by Modigliani ever to appear on the market, it dates to 1917, the year of the artist’s first and only lifetime solo exhibition at Berthe Weill’s gallery on the rue Taitbout in Paris, which scandalized Parisian society and helped build the Modigliani myth. Acquired by Lewis from the Christie’s sale of the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Ralph F. Colin in May 1995 for $11.3 million, the painting was most recently on loan to the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney.
Sue Tilley asleep nude in an armchair before a patterned lion carpet.” width=”970″ height=”1653″ data-caption=’Lucian Freud, <em>Sleeping by the Lion Carpet</em>. Estimate: £25-35 million. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Courtesy Sotheby's</span>’>
Lucian Freud took that tradition even further, 80 years later, into the unsettling reality of pure flesh and bodily vulnerability, defying any idealization while still echoing classical compositions. Freud’s four seminal portraits of his “benefits supervisor” Sue Tilley were described by art critic and historian Sebastian Smee as “among the most exciting and unprecedented paintings of the human figure in the history of art.” One of them, Sleeping by the Lion Carpet, is the other highly anticipated top lot in the Lewis sale, offered with an estimate of £25-35 million. The painting was included in the National Gallery’s major exhibition “Lucian Freud: New Perspectives” in 2022-2023, before traveling to the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, and in “Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting,” held earlier this year at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Gravity, weight and the existential truth of our ties to physical temporality and the limits of flesh are fully expressed in this uncannily hyperrealistic nude. An additional Freud highlight is the much more modern but similarly unsettling Woman in a Grey Sweater, whose confrontational stance recalls the audacity, erotic charge and female presence of Manet’s Olympia brought into close-up with contemporary urban existence. The work is estimated at £3-4 million.
The other London School masterpiece is Francis Bacon’s Two Studies for Self-Portrait, painted six years after the loss of his lover George Dyer, when Bacon was at the height of his international fame but still struggling with grief. In this relentless existential exploration of the self through painting, Bacon found a cathartic way to confront it. A double life-size apparition of a blurred, disfigured face—pink and bruised purple—dissolves into darkness; mouths scream or remain sealed shut, while the eyes turn inward in pain and refusal of the external world, confronting the ghost within. The double portrait directly relates to a self-portrait that sold in March for £16 million, double its low estimate.
Another top lot is Edgar Degas’ Petite danseuse de quatorze ans, one of the artist’s iconic ballerina sculptures, with an estimate of £18-25 million. Although approximately 150 sculptures in varying states of disrepair were found in Degas’ studio after his death in 1917, this was the only sculpture exhibited during his lifetime. Depicting Marie van Goethem, one of the ballet students at the Paris Opéra—or “little rats,” as they were known—the wax model for this piece was first seen in Paris in 1881 during the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition. At the time, audiences were shocked by its realism, perceived as vulgar and too raw in its refusal of idealization, as well as in its choice of subject: not a bourgeois sitter but the daughter of a Belgian laundress and tailor, studying with her sisters at the Opéra around the time of her 14th birthday. Conceived in wax circa 1879-1881, this bronze cast from the Lewis Collection is dated 1922. The original wax model is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., part of the Mellon Collection.
Among the evening sale’s highlights is also Gustav Klimt’s delicate portrait Bildnis Gertrud Loew, depicting the daughter of one of Vienna’s most celebrated physicians, Dr. Anton Loew, and offered with an estimate of £20-30 million. It is one of the rare full-length Klimt society portraits to have appeared on the art market; in the last 25 years, only five significant examples have come to auction, always exceeding their high estimate. Acquired by Lewis at Sotheby’s London for £22 million in June 2015, the painting was later included in “Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele: 1918 Centenary” at Neue Galerie in 2018, as well as “Klimt & Rodin: An Artistic Encounter” at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco in 2017-2018, before returning on extended loan to Neue Galerie.
The sale also includes Danaë, a masterpiece by that other legend of Austrian modernism, Egon Schiele. The painting reveals the influence Klimt had on the young artist, with a direct reference to Klimt’s 1907 painting now at the Leopold Museum, which Schiele makes more human, sensual and real, with an eroticism far less masked by elegant Viennese decorativism. In May 2017, Danaë, then estimated at $30-40 million, was withdrawn from a Sotheby’s New York sale and has since been on long-term loan at Neue Galerie, included in “Egon Schiele: Living Landscapes” in 2024-2025 after already appearing in “Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele: 1918 Centenary” in 2018. It had been on loan to the Met from 2011 to 2012 and to the Philadelphia Museum of Art between 2013 and 2017. It now returns to the block in London with an adjusted estimate of £12-18 million, making it one of the most closely watched lots of the season.
The same estimate graces an additional Modigliani, Homme à la pipe (Le notaire de Nice), portraying a man he called the “Notary of Nice,” seated in a dark suit and black cap, pipe in hand. Another anticipated top lot is Gustave Caillebotte’s Portrait de Paul Hugot, which has not been on the market for more than 30 years. Lewis acquired it at Sotheby’s London in November 1994, when it sold for £601,000. It is now offered with an estimate of £3.5-4.5 million, after appearing in the artist’s survey “Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men,” which traveled between the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago.
With the ongoing Surrealist momentum, a Magritte could not be missing from this trove, and La Belle promenade is certainly a signature one. A silhouette of a man becomes a portal to both the inner world of dreams and the sublime in a painting that reaches beyond the visible into a mysterious world of limitless possibility. Acquired by Lewis in 2014, when it sold at Christie’s London for £1.9 million, the gouache on paper is now estimated at £3-4 million.
Extremely rare to market is a painting by Russian artist Kazimir Malevich, Head of a Peasant, painted in 1911 and estimated at £1.5-2 million. Lewis acquired it at Sotheby’s London in 1993 for the much more modest sum of £190,000. While proving authenticity can be especially complicated for works from the Russian avant-garde, the painting has a substantial exhibition history, including the survey the Centre Pompidou dedicated to the artist in 1978.
Additional masterpieces from the Lewis Collection are also offered in the Modern Day Auction, highlighted by Pablo Picasso’s Portrait de Dora Maar, estimated at £600,000-800,000, one of the earliest depictions of the artist’s favorite muse, painted just after their first meeting.
The Zabludowicz Collection at Christie’s
Live June 25 and online through June 30. Estimate: £15 million.
Anita and Poju Zabludowicz’s collection played a key role in the British art scene at a pivotal moment in its evolution. Today comprising more than 5,000 works, many acquired directly from artists’ studios, the collection is anchored in the British art scene of the 1990s and the rise of the Young British Artists but extends to international artists whom the Zabludowicz Collection acquired early and who are now firmly established on the global stage. A hundred lots from the collection are set to be auctioned this June at Christie’s, with the group expected to reach £15 million across a 56-lot live single-owner sale, Beyond Ordinary – Then. Now. Next. Works from the Zabludowicz Collection, on June 25 and a dedicated online sale running through June 30.
Among the works leading the sale is Philip Guston’s 1977 work Mirror Head, which the Zabludowicz Collection acquired from Hauser & Wirth in 2017 and which is now offered with an estimate of £3.5-5.5 million. Also in the seven-figure range are Mark Bradford’s monumental Farther South and Elsewhere (2016), offered with an estimate of £1-1.5 million, and Rashid Johnson’s Untitled Broken Crowd (2021), with a £1.2 million high estimate.
On the British side, the highlight is Damien Hirst’s I Love You (1994-1995), estimated at £600,000-800,000. The work comes from the celebrated series completed before his Turner Prize win, with examples now held by institutions including the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. The Hirst will be auctioned right after Antony Gormley’s Quantum Cloud XXXII, dated 2000 and acquired from his show at White Cube the same year, with an estimate of £300,000-500,000.
The New York Pictures Generation is also represented, with Richard Prince’s iconic Untitled (Cowboy) (1994) with a high estimate of £1.2 million. Additional highlights include Neo Rauch’s surreal take on Socialist Realism, Zähmung (2011), estimated at £500,000-700,000, and pop stars such as Takashi Murakami’s Mushroom Painting #4 (2000), an early example of his Superflat aesthetic estimated at £30,000-50,000, alongside Yoshitomo Nara’s beloved Your Dog (2002), estimated at £550,000-850,000. Opening the sale will be Lubaina Himid’s Free Healthcare or Free Birdsong, acquired in 2015, well before the artist’s current level of fame, as she represents the U.K. at the Venice Biennale this year.
Two museum-grade Monets at Sotheby’s
Live on June 24. Estimate: £30-40 million and £7-10 million, respectively.
Two exceptional works by Claude Monet, painted nearly four decades apart and formerly held in two major American collections, are among the top lots in the 42-lot Sotheby’s Modern and Contemporary Evening Auction on June 24. Leading the pair is Nymphéas, a luminous, brushwork-animated vision of the artist’s celebrated water lily pond, estimated at £30-40 million—the highest estimate ever placed on a work by Monet to come to auction in Europe. Debuting at the gallery of legendary dealer Durand-Ruel in 1909 and formerly in the collection of Anne H. Bass, the painting was acquired by the estate of the current consignor at Christie’s in 2022, when it sold for $56.4 million. In 2010, it appeared in Gagosian’s dedicated exhibition of Monet’s late works.
The other is an earlier Impressionist work by Monet, Camille assise sur la plage à Trouville: a rare and intimate portrayal capturing a fleeting, wind-swept moment on the Normandy coast. Offered with a £7-10 million estimate, the work was formerly in the collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller and was acquired by the current consignor in Christie’s dedicated sale of the collection in May 2018, when it sold for £12.1 million.
Other highlights of the sale include a stunning Wassily Kandinsky, Fragment zu Improvisation II (Trauermarsch), painted in 1909 just as he was moving decisively toward abstraction, and initially held in the collection of the artist Gabriele Münter. It is estimated at £4-6 million. The sale also includes Alberto Giacometti’s Buste d’homme (New York II), a cast by Susse Fondeur, Paris, from 1972, with an estimate of £1.2-1.8 million.
Following the artist’s strong results in May, another highly anticipated lot in the seven-figure range is Mark Rothko’s fresh-to-auction Untitled, dated 1959—yellow, blue and white watercolor fields that were included in the recent exhibition of his works on paper at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., before it traveled to Oslo in 2023-2024. The estimate is £4-6 million.
On the contemporary side, highlights include an early-career Peter Doig, Cabin Essence (1993-1994), offered with an estimate of £10-15 million, and one of the largest Banksy works to come to market: the two-by-two-meter Love Is In The Air (life size), offered with a £3.5-5.5 million estimate. First executed in 2003 as a mural near the Israeli West Bank Barrier, the image was selected for the cover of the artist’s landmark publication Wall and Piece, helping build his global fame.
Cecily Brown’s The Haunter at Christie’s
Live on June 25. Estimate: £2.2-2.8 million.
Leading Christie’s Post-War to Present sale, set for June 25 at 4:30 p.m., is Cecily Brown’s The Haunter (2010): a maze of layered, visceral brushwork that evokes both flesh and nature, its sensuous, shape-shifting forms conjuring the body and a web of interrelations that characterizes our position within a vital entanglement. The painting was acquired by the consignor at the artist’s show at Gagosian in Rome in 2011. Carrying an estimate of £2.2-2.8 million, it comes to auction as the British artist is currently the subject of a major exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London.
Other highlights in the Christie’s sale include Christo’s L’Arc de Triomphe Wrapped (Project for Paris) Place de l’Etoile – Charles de Gaulle (2020), one of the final works completed during the artist’s lifetime, a preparatory study for his intervention at the Arc de Triomphe—a project conceived in the 1960s and realized posthumously in Paris in 2021. The work carries an estimate of £400,000-600,000. Also in the sale is an Andy Warhol Jackie (1964), offered with an estimate of £400,000-600,000, and Howardena Pindell’s Webb from 2023, now offered with an estimate of £180,000-250,000 following her recent representation by White Cube, which has raised her prices. Additional top lots are Günther Uecker’s Cut Soul, created in 1984 during his time in Arizona (estimate: £500,000-700,000), and Jonas Wood’s Wimbledon #6 (2013) (estimate: £80,000-120,000).
Hockney and Kusama at Phillips
Live on June 26. Estimate: £1.8-2.5 million and £700,000-900,000, respectively.
Following the recent loss of legendary British artist David Hockney, the top lot of Phillips’ extensive 94-lot Modern & Contemporary Afternoon and Evening sale in London on June 26 is his early, vibrant painting, The Only One with Waves (1991), offered with a £1.8-2.5 million estimate. Painted shortly after he acquired his home in Malibu, the work reflects all the influence of Southern California’s light, color and imagination while anticipating the groundbreaking Very New Paintings series he began the following year. The current consignor acquired it at Sotheby’s London in May 2018, when it sold for $2.17 million, making the current low estimate 33 percent higher than its previous one.
The other top lot is an example of one of Yayoi Kusama’s most coveted bodies of work, her hypnotic Infinity Nets. INFINITY-NETS (MAE), executed in 2013 in white and offered with a £800,000-1.2 million estimate, already carries a guarantee. The work has passed through the hands of several dealers, from Ota Fine Arts in Tokyo to Victoria Miro and Lévy Gorvy, which sold it to the private collection from which the current consignor acquired it. The second-highest estimate belongs to El Anatsui’s Delta, one of his iconic, intricate tapestries of aluminum caps woven together in shimmering cascades. Carrying an estimate of £700,000-900,000, the work was acquired by the consignor from Jack Shainman. Beyond those, most lots at Phillips are expected to move in the five- to six-figure range, with several still in-demand contemporary names offered at more measured estimates now that the hype has cooled, including Anna Weyant, Nicolas Party and Jadé Fadojutimi.
