The latest outbreak of war in the Middle East has done little to deter wealthy art buyers in London, judging by the packed crowd at Sotheby’s Modern and contemporary evening sale last night (4 March). “I can’t recall the last time I saw a London auction so full,” said the advisor Pauline Haon upon exiting the New Bond Street salesroom. “The art market can exist in a bubble. But two years on, I think people are more used to insecurity.”
Kicking off the 2026 auction year, the sale provided a sign of stability amid geopolitical tremors, as well as a renewed vitality for the London trade, which is still suffering a prolonged bout of the post-Brexit blues. The evening’s 54 lots totalled £106.4m (£131m with fees), falling in the lower half of its £96.1m to £136.4m pre-sale estimate (all estimates are calculated without fees). This is more than double the £63m (with fees) it made from last year’s equivalent sale and just shy of the £136m (with fees) made in 2023. Nonetheless, it is a far cry of the £221m (with fees) achieved by the 2022 sale, during the market’s last peak.
The sell-through rate was a near-perfect 98% by lot, with just one work, a 2004 Robert Ryman white painting (est £500,000-£700,000), withdrawn prior to the sale.
The crowds had gathered, in part, for a small trove of School of London paintings from the collection of the billionaire currency trader Joe Lewis, whose family trust owns Tottenham Hotspur football club. The four works—all unguaranteed— included the evening’s top lot, Francis Bacon’s 1972 self-portrait, which the artist had once gifted to his doctor as a thank you for stitching up his face after a drunken brawl. The painting made £13.5m (£16m with fees) against an £8m to £12m estimate, going to a phone bidder via specialist Lucius Elliot.
However, it was another Mod Brit darling, Leon Kossoff, who emerged as the night’s star. The late artist’s lively, impastoed Children’s Swimming Pool, Autumn Afternoon (1971) (est £600,000-£800,000), is one of five depicting the Willesden Green swimming pool near Kossoff’s home in north London, with other works from the series held in the collections of Tate, the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, and Arts Council England.
Compared to some of his heavyweight peers (such as Freud and Bacon, as well as Frank Auerbach), Kossoff’s market is underdeveloped—until yesterday his record stood at £1.4m. Last night served as a course correction, with the painting chased by around ten bidders, including three in the room, before hammering at £4.5m (£5.2m with fees) to a phone bidder via Alex Branczik.
Alex Branczik bidding on Leon Kossoff’s Children’s Swimming Pool, Autumn Afternoon (1971)
Courtesy of Sotheby’s
“Exceptional works command exceptional prices,” says the London dealer Offer Waterman. “Completely fresh to the market and belonging to one of the most celebrated and pivotal series in Kossoff’s oeuvre, its superb provenance—formerly in the Saatchi Collection and more recently part of the collection of Joe Lewis—made the opportunity to acquire it even more compelling.”
At the last minute, Sotheby’s, evidently sensing this demand, swapped the order of the evening’s lots to place the Kossoff at the start of the Lewis collection, hoping to inject some energy into the proceedings. Nonetheless, the fervour failed to hold for a disquieting nude by Freud, which hammered around its £6m low estimate.
Another single-owner collection, all guaranteed in house, brought a group of Lucio Fontanas to a more lukewarm reception. The star lot, one of the Spatialist titan’s Concetto spaciales, a hulking, craterous 1960 canvas in black and jade green, carried the evening’s highest estimate of £8.5m to £12m, and went at its low estimate to its third-party guarantor. “Fontana’s market hasn’t been strong since 2016,” Haon notes. “Despite his historical significance, he is not fashionable with the younger collectors who are driving the market. Considering the retreat from Minimalism, I am pleasantly surprised Sotheby’s could still find a buyer at this price level.”
By the sale’s second half, a stodgier pace, more resemblant of the London evening sales of late, had returned to the salesroom, with most works hammering around or below their low estimates. A 1986 Basquiat painting that did not sell initially—due to a clerical computing error, Sotheby’s said— was brought back later in the sale to make just £3.6m, well below its £6m low estimate (the house will be pleased to have not guaranteed this work).
The flight to certainty endures in this shakier market, and the sale was heavily weighted towards classic tastes: post-Impressionist, Modern and highly established contemporary works by mostly Brits and Europeans. In a testament to just how much the ultra-contemporary market has cooled, not a single work offered during the sale was by an artist below the age of 60. The youngest artist represented was Damien Hirst.
The post-sale mood among Sotheby’s specialists appeared buoyant, and hopeful that the worst of London’s doldrums might indeed be over. “It’s been a lean few years,” said Ottilie Windsor, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art, London, shortly after the auction closed. She cited the presence of three single-owner collections in the sale as evidence of a return to form and renewed confidence among consignors. “Beginning from the Pauline Karpidas sale in September, we’ve had a string of positive results. Some works sold below estimate tonight, but there were multiple buyers across all levels, and that reassures sellers.”
Nonetheless, it will take more than a few good seasons to recover the significant losses the city has faced in recent years. For a point of comparison, no consignment this month at any London auction house has surpassed an estimate of £15.5m, while during the 2019 March sales season, five works were valued at £20m or more. Christie’s 20/21 Century evening sale tonight will reveal whether this positive mood can last a whole week, let alone a year. After all, the first sunshine is often a false spring.
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