Art News: Kandinsky's £31.6 Million Leads London's October Auctions

Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips held their autumn evening sales in London on 14 and 15 October, in Frieze week. Christie's two sales on the Wednesday made £218.6 million with fees, by far the strongest night of the week. On the Thursday Sotheby's made £45.9 million and Phillips £14.8 million. Here are the results that matter, house by house, and what they mean if you are thinking of selling.

Christie's: Kandinsky, Mondrian and the Monsoon collection

The top lot of the week was Wassily Kandinsky's Das bunte Leben (The Colourful Life), painted in 1907, which sold in Christie's 20th/21st Century Evening Sale for £31,560,000 with fees after six minutes of bidding, well above its estimate of £18 million to £25 million. It is a large canvas, about 130 by 162 cm, of a crowd in old Russian dress below a walled town on a hill, painted a few years before he turned to abstraction.

Its history explains much of the price. Hedwig and Emanuel Albert Lewenstein, a Jewish couple in Amsterdam, bought it in 1927, and from 1933 it was on loan to the Stedelijk Museum. On 9 October 1940, five months into the German occupation of the Netherlands, it was auctioned in circumstances that remain unclear. In 1972 the Bayerische Landesbank bought it, and for five decades it hung on loan at the Lenbachhaus in Munich. The Lewenstein heirs sued for its return in 2017. In 2023 an independent German commission found that it had been lost as a result of Nazi persecution, and that June the bank returned it to them.

In the same sale Piet Mondrian's Composition III of 1920, never before at auction, made £25.2 million with fees, within its estimate of £20 million to £30 million. David Hockney's Dog Painting 17, the first of his dog paintings to be offered, made £3.51 million, and Liubov Popova's Painterly Architectonic of 1918 set a record for the Russian avant-garde painter at £7.6 million with fees, more than three times its low estimate. Hurvin Anderson's Last House of 2013 made £5.7 million. Of the 46 lots offered, 39 sold.

Christie's on King Street, St James's, June 2026. Photo: Ewan-M, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The same evening Christie's sold the collection of Peter Simon, the founder of the Monsoon clothing chain, for £107.5 million with fees, which the house says is the highest total for a single-owner collection in its London history. All but one of the 41 lots sold, the exception a 1967 painting by Frank Auerbach. Francis Bacon's Figure in Movement of 1978 led it at £17.2 million, and Bridget Riley's Streak 2 set a new record for her at £5,214,000.

Sotheby's: a European record for de Kooning

Sotheby's Contemporary Evening Auction on Thursday was quieter. It made £45.9 million with fees, against £47.6 million for the same sale a year ago, and its hammer total of £36.9 million fell short of the £39.5 million low estimate. Three lots were withdrawn, and 28 of the 34 offered sold.

Willem de Kooning's Untitled of 1977 led at £9.8 million with fees, the highest price for the artist at auction in Europe and about two and a half times what it made at Sotheby's in New York in 2015. Gerhard Richter's Abstraktes Bild of 1992 made £6.7 million, against £3.6 million when it last sold, in 2011, and a Mark Rothko of 1969, bought for $264,000 in 1992, made £3.8 million. Hockney did well here too: Henry Reading, a collage of 1985, made £2.8 million, and an iPad drawing of water lilies made £1.9 million, more than three times its low estimate and a record for one of his iPad works. Michael Andrews's Butterfly Fish, a work on paper of 1978, made £704,000, nearly five times its high estimate.

Sotheby's on New Bond Street, Mayfair, April 2020. Photo: Kwh1050, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Not everything found a buyer. Banksy's Grannies, estimated at £1.5 million to £2 million, went unsold, as did paintings by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Jadé Fadojutimi, and a wall sculpture of 2021 by Yayoi Kusama was knocked down for £250,000, a quarter of its low estimate.

Phillips: Richter and Banksy

Phillips' Modern & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, also on 15 October, was smaller, at £14.8 million with fees, but all 20 lots offered sold. Richter's Mathis of 1983, from the collection of the French collector Marcel Brient, made £5,839,000 with fees, just under its £6 million low estimate. Banksy's Keep Ou T, his Brexit gate from Heathrow, made £1,612,500, within its estimate, and Hockney's Red and Black Fruit made £993,300. The sale opened with a record for the Danish painter Eva Helene Pade, whose Yellow Nights made £167,700, more than three times its high estimate.

At Bonhams the same day, Riley's Ka 4, an oil on linen of 1980, made £915,500.

What the week means if you are selling

The works that ran furthest past their estimates were the ones new to the market: the Kandinsky had not been sold for more than fifty years, the Mondrian and the Hockney dog painting had never been offered at auction, and the Bacon had been in one private collection for twenty years. A clear history counted too, and with the Kandinsky it was the history that made the sale possible. Where estimates were set high, as with the Kusama, buyers held back, and several contemporary paintings at Sotheby's did not sell at all.

Results like these become the figures that later sales of similar works are measured against. If you own a work by any of the artists here and are thinking of selling, send us photographs for a free valuation. There is no obligation to sell, and we act for you rather than for the saleroom.

Cover: Wassily Kandinsky, Das bunte Leben, 1907, the painting sold at Christie's. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.