Christie's King Street sold 50 of 54 lots from Klaus Hegewisch's collection of prints and drawings for £8.9 million, led by a Picasso study for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.
Klaus Hegewisch’s collection of prints and drawings reached Christie’s King Street on Thursday 16 October 2025, in Frieze week, when 50 of the 54 lots sold for £8.9 million.
Hegewisch, who lived from 1919 to 2014, was a Hamburg merchant and passionate sailor who became a collector after the Second World War, assembling works with his wives Helga and Erika. The Hamburger Kunsthalle opened the Hegewisch-Kabinett in 1997 to show his collection in rotating exhibitions, and it ran for two decades.
Christie’s has sold from King Street since 1823, and its founder James Christie held his first sale in 1766. Hegewisch collected from Dürer and Rembrandt through Goya and Redon to Munch, Dix and Beckmann, and the whole collection carried an estimate of £10 million to £15 million. Part I was the first of three sales planned, with further parts announced for March and September 2026. Its lots ran through seven chapters, from Charms, Spells and Curses to Melancholy and Landscapes of the Mind.
Picasso’s 1907 study for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Nez quart de Brie, led the session. Seventy-two per cent of the lots that sold exceeded their high estimates, and Picasso’s 1904 etching Le repas frugal, estimated at £1.5 million to £2.5 million, was bought in. A Gustave Doré illustration for Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven made about fourteen times its low estimate.