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British billionaire's £200m art collection most expensive ever offered in UK

British billionaire Joe Lewis will sell a tranche of his art collection in a standalone sale at Sotheby’s in London this June, estimated at £150m–£200m. This makes it the most valuable single-owner collection ever offered in the UK, surpassing the Pauline Karpidas collection which totalled £101m. Highlights include Gustav Klimt’s *Bildnis Gertrud Loew* (est £20m–£30m), Amedeo Modigliani’s *Homme à la pipe* (est £12m–£18m), and Francis Bacon’s *Two Studies for Self-Portrait* (est £8m–£12m). The sale follows a smaller March auction of four works from the Lewis collection that focused on School of London artists.

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The Panama Papers leak has revealed that the 1997 sale of the Victor and Sally Ganz collection at Christie's New York was secretly orchestrated by billionaire currency trader Joseph Lewis. Lewis had already purchased the top works from the collection through a Christie's subsidiary, Spink & Son, months before the auction, and structured a guarantee that shared profits above $168 million. The sale, which set a private collection auction record at $206 million, included Pablo Picasso's "Women of Algiers (version O)" fetching $31.9 million. The documents also confirm that a Modigliani painting involved in a Nazi restitution case belongs to the Nahmad family.