A nude that scandalized Paris more than a century ago has set a new European auction record. Amedeo Modigliani's Nu assis au collier ("Seated Nude Wearing a Necklace"), painted in 1917, sold for roughly £48 million — about $64 million — at Sotheby's in London on June 24, France 24 reported. It is the highest price ever paid for a Modigliani at auction in Europe.
The Lewis collection comes to market
The painting was the star lot of a sale of works assembled by Joe Lewis, the British billionaire and former owner of Tottenham Hotspur, and his family. The single-owner evening sale far exceeded expectations: its opening session alone totaled around $392.6 million, according to Artnet News, with the large majority of lots selling above their high estimates.
Other highlights included works by Gustav Klimt and Lucian Freud, but it was the Modigliani that drew the deepest bidding. Lewis had bought the painting at auction in the mid-1990s for a fraction of Wednesday's price, ARTnews reported — a striking measure of how far the top of the market has climbed.
A European record — but not a global one
The result, extraordinary as it is for a European sale, sits below Modigliani's global auction high. That benchmark was set in 2015, when his reclining nude Nu couché sold in New York for $170.4 million, briefly one of the most expensive artworks ever sold at auction. The highest-value modern art sales have historically clustered in New York; London remains Europe's leading saleroom, and the new figure marks the first time a Modigliani has reached this level on the European side of the Atlantic.
A painter who shocked, then sold
Modigliani painted his celebrated series of nudes in the final years of a short life; he died in Paris in 1920 at the age of 35. When some of the works were shown at a Paris gallery in 1917, police reportedly demanded the window display be covered, judging the frank depiction obscene.
That early notoriety has only added to the works' allure. The nudes — with their elongated forms, warm tones and enigmatic gazes — are now among the most coveted of modern paintings, and relatively few remain in private hands, with most held in museums. Their scarcity helps explain the prices they command whenever one reaches the block.
A resilient market at the top
The sale underlines the continued strength of demand for blue-chip early-twentieth-century art, even amid wider economic uncertainty. Records set in New York have long defined the Modigliani market; the Sotheby's result shows that, for the right work with the right history, Europe's salerooms can rewrite the books too.
