Christie's sold the Roger and Josette Vanthournout Collection on King Street for £40.3 million, led by Picasso's Nu debout et femmes assises at £7.0 million.
Christie’s sold Modern Visionaries, the collection of the Belgian couple Roger and Josette Vanthournout, at Christie’s King Street in St James’s on Thursday 5 March 2026. The evening sold 30 of its 31 lots for £40,317,750.
Roger trained in design and decoration and founded a furniture manufacturing business. Josette was a painter.
Over more than sixty years they collected from their home in Flanders, where sculpture had a central place. Their interests moved from Chinese ceramics and Flemish Expressionism to Surrealism, Minimalism and the post-war art of Europe and America.
The evening followed the Art of the Surreal sale at King Street. It sold 97 per cent by lot and 94 per cent by value. Olivier Camu of Christie’s called the results a tribute to the couple’s sixty-year passion for discovering and collecting.
Pablo Picasso’s Nu debout et femmes assises of 1939 led at £7,004,000, and Henry Moore’s bronze Goslar Warrior made £4,564,000. René Magritte’s Le lieu-dit and Lucio Fontana’s Concetto spaziale, Attese each made £3,466,000.
Jacques Lipchitz’s Jeune fille à la tresse, conceived in 1914, made £2,002,000, almost three times its high estimate.