Ex-Spurs owner Joe Lewis's art collection could fetch £150m

Joe Lewis, former owner of Tottenham Hotspur — (Image credit: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

British billionaire Joe Lewis's art collection could fetch millions disproves the notion that establishing a world-class art collection and amassing a fortune as a financial trader have little in common. The former Tottenham Hotspur owner's art collection is heading for sale with Sotheby's in London next month, where it is expected to make at least £150 million in total. That would make it, in some way, the most valuable single-owner collection ever sold in London, surpassing the £101 million record set last September by that of Pauline Karpidas, the widow of a Greek shipping magnate. “The range and quality [of the artworks for sale] show the incomparable ambition and sophistication of Joe as a collector, and also the assertiveness and boldness that he has always displayed as a currency dealer,” Oliver Barker, chairman of Sotheby's Europe, tells The Times.

Highlights of the Joe Lewis sale

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'Self portrait' by Irish-British painter Francis Bacon — (Image credit: JUSTIN TALLIS / AFP via Getty Images)

'Self portrait' by Francis Bacon

Highlights of the Joe Lewis sale include a full-length portrait of Gertrud Loew, who was a young woman of fin-de-siècle Viennese society, painted by Gustav Klimt in 1902. Loew, later known as Gertha Felsovanyi, left Austria for the US in 1939 on account of her Jewish ancestry. During her absence, the painting was sold under duress and acquired by Gustav Klimt's son Gustav Ucicky, eventually ending up in the collection of the Klimt Foundation. It was later sold as part of a settlement between the Foundation and Loew's heirs. Sotheby's expects it to sell for around £30 million.

Another highlight is the sculpture Petite danseuse de quatorze ans, created in wax by Edgar Degas in about 1880 and cast in bronze in the 1920s, after the artist's death. That one is expected to fetch £25 million. Amedeo Modigliani's 1918 portrait Homme à la pipe is valued at up to £18 million, as is Egon Schiele's Danaë from 1909. Among the more recent works, Two Studies for Self-Portrait, painted by Francis Bacon in 1977, is valued at £12 million, and Woman in a Grey Sweater, painted by Lucien Freud in the late 1980s, is valued at £4 million.

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Joe Lewis, who was born above a pub in Bow in 1937, has made and lost fortunes during his long career as a restaurateur-turned-currency trader. He cashed in when his bet that the pound would be forced out of the European exchange rate mechanism came good in 1992. Then, years later in 2008, he lost around $1.2 billion buying shares in Bear Stearns, right up until the moment the Wall Street investment bank collapsed. It was, according to a MoneyWeek article from the time, “one of the most misguided gambles Wall Street has ever seen”. That perhaps explains why this time Lewis tested the waters in March, when he offered through Sotheby's four paintings from the School of London – two by Freud, one by Bacon and another by Leon Kossoff. Together, they doubled their combined low estimate to realise a total of £35.8 million. That is as clear a sign as any that, with the upcoming sale, he might just be on to a winner.