Billionaire Joe Lewis scores huge art gains to reshape empire

Billionaire Joe Lewis is losing money this year on one of his biggest listed holdings, but a group of private assets inside the investor’s sprawling fortune is minting big returns.

The Tavistock Group founder has locked in gains of more than 500% at each of three recent art auctions in London, selling scores of pieces behind one of the world’s biggest private collections, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That’s reshaping a distinctive part of a business empire that spans everything from US luxury hotels to British private credit firms.

He’s netted almost £350 million ($469 million) overall from Sotheby’s auctions of about 50 works from artists including Francis Bacon, Gustav Klimt and Edgar Degas, with most of the sales coming across two days in late June. Winning bids for the pieces last month rose as much as 329% above their high estimates, driving one of the biggest-ever sales globally from a single art collection.

“It’s a turning point,” Oliver Barker, chair of Sotheby’s Europe, who worked with the Lewis family on the auctions, said in an interview. “A collection of this magnitude has to evolve.”

The pieces sold this year from more than two-dozen different artists give a rare insight into how Lewis has shifted his investments into art after making a fortune in the hospitality industry and turbo-charging his wealth in currency markets.

He acquired more than half the artworks sold this year during the 1990s, a defining period for the Bahamas-based investor when he made wildly lucrative trades speculating on the British pound and Mexican peso. In the foreign exchange world, Lewis became known as the Boxer, a reflection of his heavyweight status and nod to his namesake, US champion fighter Joe Louis.

He and his family are now worth about $9.4 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Almost 10% is tied up in art market investments, the index shows, with Lewis’s 65-year-old daughter Vivienne increasingly leading efforts to reshape the collection.

“I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about letting them go,” Vivienne, a senior managing director at Tavistock Group, said in a statement on the June auction, which also included works from Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Amedeo Modigliani. “To my surprise, even before the sale began, I felt good about it.”

Works from the Lewis Collection have adorned public and private settings of the billionaire’s business empire, making art more than simply a personal interest for an investor who received a pardon from US President Donald Trump in November for a 2024 conviction in New York over inside-trading.

Read more: Trump Pardons UK Billionaire Joe Lewis Over Insider Trading

A cast Lewis owns of Arturo Di Modica’s bronze “Charging Bull” statue, famed for featuring in Manhattan’s financial district, sits in a 50,000 square-foot garden within a community that Tavistock Group has developed in Florida.

Pieces from British sculptors Henry Moore and Philip Jackson feature on the same premises, underscoring Lewis’s taste for artists harking back to his home nation, despite building a life as a tax exile.

Joe Lewis’s superyacht Aviva. Photographer: Jack Taylor/Getty Images

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Lewis, a former shareholder of Sotheby’s rival Christie’s who started out in London’s less privileged East End district, also previously housed works from British painter Francis Bacon in his 322-foot (98-meter) superyacht, Aviva.

A Bacon self-portrait was the highlight of the Lewis family’s earlier sale of so-called “Masterpieces.”

A 1992 portrait of Bacon by fellow British painter Stephen Conroy acquired by Lewis two decades ago hung for years by the billionaire’s desk. The same piece received a £60,000 winning bid last month, almost 25% above its high estimate for the auction.

The sales for the Lewis Collection pieces, which fetched winning bids last month of as much as £48.2 million, represented a boost for London’s high-end art scene after a global downturn in the sector last year.

Prized works offer a typically stable asset class to preserve wealth, while still offering the potential for outsized gains. The global average for art prices at auction has risen more than five-times since 1990, even with values declining in recent years, according to data from Art Market Research.

“Buying a Picasso and having it on the wall of your living room is an effective piece of ultimate financial security,” Gilles Erulin, founder and chief executive officer of Westwick Melrose & Cromwell, a London-based advisory firm for wealthy families. “It’s about having a safe haven currency.”

Lewis diversified his wealth through sports investments, including a major stake in Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, the Premier League team he’s supported since his childhood. He transferred a majority holding to a family trust in 2022, when it was ranked among the world’s most valuable football teams.

Lewis’s other assets include a controlling stake in cattle producer Australian Agricultural Co., one of his biggest listed holdings, which has declined in value this year.

Tavistock is now expanding another Florida development after already spending $1 billion transforming it into a resort with a five-star hotel and a condo tower with $14.5 million penthouses. Meantime, the Lewis family have made plans to inject at least an extra £100 million into Tottenham Hotspur, Bloomberg reported last month, after the team narrowly avoided a shock relegation from the Premier League.

One Lewis Collection piece sold this year from French painter Chaim Soutine depicts a young male worker in the decade before the UK billionaire was born, echoing his own humble origins. Lewis bought the painting at a Christie’s auction about three decades ago for $350,000. He parted with it for more than seven times that figure.

“We’ve always known we were only ever custodians of these works,” Vivienne Lewis said. “I’m especially happy we chose to do this in London, the place where our journey began.”

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