Billionaire Joe Lewis scores 3,500% return on ‘Masterpieces’ art

[LONDON] Joe Lewis once turbocharged his multi-billion-dollar fortune, taking big swings in the currency markets. Now, the British investor and his family are cashing in on lucrative bets made in another sector: art.

The Tavistock Group founder notched gains of more than 3,500 per cent through offloading long-held parts of his art collection from UK painters Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Leon Kossoff at a Sotheby’s auction in London this week, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

A 1972 self-portrait of Francis Bacon was the most highly-priced item on Wednesday (Mar 4) evening of the Lewis Collection’s four pieces from the so-called School of London artists. It received a winning bid of £13.5 million (S$23 million), beating high sale estimates and dwarfing Lewis’s £364,500 investment to buy the piece in 1994. The other three works Sotheby’s cited as “Masterpieces” from the Lewis Collection recorded winning bids totalling £16 million, with some also fetching prices above the top estimates.

A spokesperson for the Lewis family said the School of London artists, who rose to prominence after World War II for figurative paintings that rejected abstraction, have been a core focus for the billionaire and his relatives for decades as they sought to champion that period of British art.

Lewis, 89, and his family oversee a fortune totalling about US$8.8 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. About 12.5 per cent of that is tied up in art market investments.

Lewis “has an outstanding collection”, Sotheby’s chief executive officer Charles F Stewart said at Wednesday’s auction, which recorded £131 million in sales from the approximately 50 items on offer, a more than doubling from 12 months earlier. His pieces “were among the very best works on offer”.

The sales show Lewis parting with a group of assets that hark back to the early days of him building one of the world’s biggest fortunes, which now spans real estate, sports and clothing businesses. The auction’s success also shows the art sector offering attractive returns amid wild swings in other markets, with geopolitical tension rising.

At around the same time as Freud, Bacon and Kossoff were becoming influential figures on London’s art scene, Lewis transformed his family’s catering business into a chain of themed restaurants.

He sold that venture in the late 1970s for about £30 million, an early windfall in his rags-to-riches rise from the English capital’s less privileged East End district.

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He became a prolific currency trader after relocating to the Bahamas but boosted his UK investments in the early 2000s with the purchase of a major stake in Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, the Premier League team he’d supported since his childhood. He transferred his majority stake in the team to a discretionary trust in 2022, the year before he became the central figure in a US insider-trading case in which he ultimately pleaded guilty but avoided prison, partly due to his age and health.

US President Donald Trump pardoned Lewis in November to help the British investor receive medical treatment and see family in the nation, capping off one of the most turbulent periods of his career.

The art collection that Lewis and his 64 year-old daughter Vivienne have accumulated also spans works from other 20th century artistic giants such as Pablo Picasso, Gustav Klimt and Edgar Degas.

While Bacon’s self-portrait benefited most from prices rising during the time of the Lewis family ownership, the Kossoff piece was the focus of the most of frantic bidding on the evening. Almost a dozen separate parties vied to own the artwork, leading to its final hammer price surging to £4.2 million, more than five times its higher sale estimate from Sotheby’s before the auction.

Lewis “chose to sell in London at this moment”, Stewart said. “And was rewarded for it”. BLOOMBERG