Christie’s achieves £219m in ‘steady, solid’ London sales

Christie’s kicked off the October marquee auction week in London with a four-hour charade at its London King Street premises. It delivered solid results on Wednesday (14 October) evening, with both the 20th/21st Century Evening Sale and the high-profile “Monsoon” sale of the collection from Peter Simon generating better-than-expected results, bringing in a combined total of £178m, £218.6m after fees.

Kicking off straight after the opening of Frieze London and Masters, the evening was led by works from blue-chip, 20th-century artists. Wassily Kandinsky’s storied 1907 painting Das bunte Leben, restituted to the heirs of the German Jewish art collector Hedwig Lewenstein-Weyermann in June 2023, was the overall top-seller, sold for £27m (£31.6m with fees), above the pre-sale high estimate of £25m (all estimates calculated without fees). It sold to a phone bidder represented by Maria Los, Christie's deputy chairman and head of client advisory, Americas, after a six-minute cautious bidding battle.

“It was a steady, solid sale, with active bidding throughout, thanks in large part to the high quality and rarity of the pieces on offer, especially some of the top lots,” said the art advisor Rebecca Wei, who was present in the saleroom, referring to the Kandinsky and the second top lot, Piet Mondrian’s 1920 painting Composition III , also from the 20th/21st Century Evening Sale.

Fresh to the market, the Mondrian was among a landmark series of eight paintings, five of which are in renowned museum collections including the Tate in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Estimated between £20m-£30m, it hammered at £21.5m (£25.2m after fees) to a phone bidder represented by Katharine Arnold, Christie’s vice-chairman of 20th/21st century art. Both the Kandinsky and the Mondrian were third-party guaranteed.

The auction marathon began with a jam-packed saleroom for the “Monsoon” evening sale dedicated to the collection accrued by the founder of the British high-street clothing chain. Billed as the highest-value, single-owner collection sold by Christie’s, the auction totalled £86.9m (£107.5m after fees), within pre-sale expectations. All 41 lots were guaranteed, with 11 of them guaranteed by the house and the rest by third-party. All lots sold except the 1967 Frank Auerbach painting, achieving a 98% sell-through rate with 43% of the lots selling above the high estimate.

After the final lot went under the hammer, Christie's post-war and contemporary art specialist Joseph Braka, who headed the sale, embraced the team of specialists manning the phones, a rare and emotional moment in the saleroom. Jussi Pylkkänen, the house’s former global president and now an adviser, patted Braka on the shoulder.

The team’s immediate after-sale reaction suggested that the results were satisfactory. Leading this sale was Francis Bacon’s fresh-to-the-auction-market painting Figure in Movement (1978), which Simon acquired from the British dealer and collector Ivor Braka (incidentally, Joseph's father) in 2006. The work sold to a woman in the room, announced auctioneer Adrien Meyer, for £14.5m (£17.2m after fees), the third most valuable lot sold that evening.

It was followed by another Mondrian work, Composition A, with Double Line and Yellow (1935), which sold for £8m (£9.7m with fees), the fourth priciest lot of the evening, and Joan Miró’s Peinture (Les amants, Adam et Eve) (1925), also making its auction debut, which sold for £7m (£8.6m with fees), the fifth most valuable piece of the evening.

One of the most notable lots, according to Wei, was the Russian artist Liubov Popova’s Painterly Architectonic (1918). The work hammered at a record £6.2m (£7.6m with fees) after almost eight minutes of competitive bidding in the room and on the phones. It sold for more than three times the presale low estimate of £1.8m and nearly four times her previous record set in 2007. “This was probably not a surprise because her work is so rare,” Wei noted. The sale also set records for Portia Zvavahera (£307,200 with fees), Bridget Riley (£5.2m with fees), David Bomberg (£3.3m with fees) and a painting record for Barbara Hepworth (£537,600 with fees).

Another highlight, noted Wei, was Hurvin Anderson’s Last House (2013). The intense bidding among three phone bidders drove the hammer price to £4.6m (£5.7m after fees), more than double the presale low estimate of £2m. Anderson’s paintings have been appealing to Asian collectors in recent years, Wei said.

The race continued with the 20th/21st Century Evening after a short break. The sale totalled £90.5m (£111.1m after fees) against adjusted pre-sale estimates of £86m-£126m. It was slightly above the £106.9m total achieved at the equivalent sale last October and in-line with the £114.2m total in March’s 20th-/21st-century evening auction. Among the 46 lots (after five lots were withdrawn), seven were bought in, achieving an 85% sell-through rate.

The sale set a record for South African artist Igshaan Adams, whose T he certainty of being a rose (ii) (2026) sold for £96,000 to benefit Artists for Climate Action .

“The combined results tonight, £219m, and prices achieved for Kandinsky, Mondrian and Bacon further reinforce London’s position as a key international market for museum-quality masterpieces,” said Keith Gill, Christie's vice-chairman, 20th/21st century art said in a statement. “We look forward to following this success with the same energy and confidence throughout Frieze Week, and into Paris and New York.”