Masterpieces by Bacon, Freud and Kossoff from the Lewis Collection to lead Sotheby's March sales
A storied Francis Bacon self-portrait – painted in 1972 in the shadow of devastating personal loss – leads an extraordinary quartet of paintings from The Lewis Collection, set to headline Sotheby’s Modern & Contemporary sales in London.
Two career-defining portraits by Lucian Freud, and Leon Kossoff’s Children’s Swimming Pool – widely considered the artist’s masterpiece – complete the group.
Together, these paintings capture the School of London at its height and the zenith of each artist’s career – raw, psychologically charged, and profoundly human. Assembled over decades by Joe Lewis and his daughter Vivienne, among the movement’s greatest champions, each of these museum-quality works holds a central place in the story of post-war painting. These artists’ unflinching focus on the human figure laid the foundations for figurative painting today, influencing a generation of artists worldwide – from Jenny Saville and Tracey Emin, to Cecily Brown and Hurvin Anderson.
Lucian Freud, Blond Girl on a Bed 1987 Estimate: £6,000,000 - £8,000,000
The four works will be on public view at the Breuer Building in New York from 17 through 19 February – marking a return to a city that has long embraced these artists. In 1948, the Museum of Modern Art first introduced Bacon to American audiences, praising the artist’s “savage and obsessive intensity”; and it was a New Yorker – the dealer William Acquavella – whom Lucian Freud credited with transforming the trajectory of his career. For Kossoff, the exhibition offers New Yorkers the first opportunity to see what is widely considered his finest achievement.
Lucian Freud, A Young Painter 1957-58 Estimate: £4,000,000 - £6,000,000
The School of London was not a movement in the conventional sense; it was rather a small group of free-spirited London-based artists who resolutely pursued their own separate but related visions. Fully, almost obsessively, engaged with the world and people around them, they created paintings that were far removed from the tide of abstraction, minimalism and conceptualism that dominated American and other European art in the postwar period. Together, with their thickly laden brushes and endlessly tumultuous lives, these London artists up-ended tradition and created a completely new path forward for figurative art.
Soho was the social and psychological crucible of this milieu, and Francis Bacon was its gravitational centre. Every day Bacon would drink at the French House, Wheeler’s Restaurant, and above all the Colony Room Club, a social magnet that drew in artists of disparate ages and stylistic impulses. Bacon and Freud reportedly saw each other every day for twenty-five years after meeting in the mid-1940s, but also Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews and others.
Leon Kossoff, Children’s Swimming Pool, 11 O’Clock Saturday Morning, August 1969 1969 Estimate: £600,000 - £800,000
The personalities animating the group were as uncompromising as the paintings themselves. Bacon was flamboyant and ferociously intelligent – cruelly funny, obsessively drawn to gambling and excess, cultivating chaos as a means of control. His minuscule South Kensington studio was a theatre of chance in which paint-smeared photographs, torn magazines, dust, and debris conspired in the act of creation. Following his death in 1992, a team of archeologists did a painstaking, two-year excavation of the studio to document and catalogue the conditions under which his work was made. Freud, by contrast, approached painting with monastic discipline. He worked slowly and obsessively, demanding exhaustive sittings from friends, lovers, and family. Models were subjected to prolonged scrutiny – sometimes nodding off under the weight of his gaze, only to be repositioned and resumed. Kossoff occupied a quieter register, though no less intense. His models were close friends and family. He described drawing as a process of discovery – “finding out what something really looks like”, returning obsessively to particular places in his neighbourhood over years, sometimes decades, as London rebuilt itself after the war: high streets, railway bridges, his local pool.
Main Image: FRANCIS BACON Self-Portrait 1972 Estimate: £8,000,000 - £12,000,000