Modigliani nude sells for $63.9 million at Sotheby’s London auction

Sotheby’s sold Amedeo Modigliani’s Nu assis au collier, or Seated Nude Wearing a Necklace, for $63.9 million in London, setting the highest price ever achieved for a Modigliani work sold at auction in Europe. The 1917-18 painting, Lot 13 in Sotheby’s Masterpieces from the Lewis Collection sale, drew seven bidders before going to a private collector from Asia.

The canvas measures 91.5 by 59.7 cm, or 36 by 23½ inches, and had not appeared at auction for more than three decades. Sotheby’s said it was last sold at Christie’s New York on May 10, 1995, after passing through the hands of collectors and dealers including Léopold Zborowski, Jonas Netter, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Alex. Reid & Lefevre, Etienne Bignou and Ralph F. Colin. The auction house also said the work had been requested for Modigliani Nord Sud at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco from July 8 to September 3, 2028.

The result came inside a broader disposal of works from British billionaire Joe Lewis’s collection, where 48 works by artists including Pablo Picasso, René Magritte and Gustav Klimt were offered across Sotheby’s London evening sales. Sotheby’s said the first part of the sale raised $392.6 million, while the full evening, including the broader modern and contemporary sale, reached £393.4 million with fees. Klimt’s Bildnis Gertrud Loew sold for $47.9 million to a private collector from Asia, and Lucian Freud’s Sleeping by the Lion Carpet brought $38.8 million.

The Modigliani price also reset the benchmark for a single-owner collection in Europe, surpassing the Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé sale in Paris in 2009, which brought €373.9 million. At £48.2 million, the painting also cleared an estimate of more than £45 million, underscoring how high-end buyers are still willing to compete for rare, museum-grade works with long provenance.

The demand carried a familiar Modigliani charge. His nude series caused scandal in Paris in 1917, when police shut down his only solo exhibition on obscenity grounds, and the market still treats those works as a category apart. Sotheby’s said buyers from Asia bid on half of the Lewis lots and won more than a third of the works offered, a sign that the deepest competition for trophy art is increasingly global and still centered on collectors with the means to pay for scarcity, history and status in a single purchase.