Piet Mondrian’s Composition III, a 1920 painting never before at auction, sold for £25,235,000 at Christie’s London. The price includes fees. It came on the evening of Wednesday 14 October, in the week of Frieze London, against an estimate of £20 million to £30 million; in dollars it is about $33.4 million, with the hammer at $28.4 million, Artnet reported. Before the sale, Christie’s had called it the most important Mondrian offered at auction in Europe since 2009. It made the second-highest price of an evening that brought Christie’s £218.6 million.
£25,235,000 for a canvas of 53 by 51 centimetres
The painting is small. Christie’s gives its size as 53.4 by 51.2 centimetres, oil on canvas, and describes a composition built only from the colours Mondrian’s Neo-Plastic system allowed: “the three primary colours, red, yellow and blue, together with black, white and grey”. At the centre sits a yellow square, “aligned on the axis of symmetry”. Before London the work travelled to Zurich, Paris, New York and Hong Kong in September, and it went on view at King Street from 8 October. The final price sits inside the estimate. Mondrian’s auction record is still the $51 million paid at Sotheby’s in November 2022 for Composition No. II, of 1930. Artnet set the result against a closer benchmark: the previous high for a Mondrian of 1920 was $8.9 million, paid at Christie’s Paris in 2009.
Eight paintings from Mondrian’s breakthrough year
In 1920 Mondrian’s abstraction found its rules. He had returned to Paris in late 1919, and Christie’s puts the year plainly: “Throughout 1920, he systematically established the principles of his pioneering abstract language.” He finished just eight landmark paintings that year. Five are now in museums: Tate in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome and the Wilhelm-Hack Museum in Ludwigshafen. Composition III is not one of the five. It had never been offered at auction, and Christie’s placed it “among the most important and rarest of his paintings ever to come to market”.
“We are delighted to celebrate Mondrian’s extraordinary legacy and present his masterpiece from 1920.” Keith Gill, Vice Chairman 20/21, Christie’s, before the sale
Kandinsky, Bacon and a £218.6 million night
Christie’s held two evening sales back to back. The first, 41 lots from a single British private collection, made £107.5 million. The second, the 20th/21st Century London Evening Sale that included the Mondrian, made £111.1 million. Together they took £218,603,400, a 103% increase on the total of last year, according to Christie’s, with 91% of the lots sold and 96% of the value. The top price was £31.6 million, for Wassily Kandinsky’s Das bunte Leben, of 1907. Christie’s said the Kandinsky and the Mondrian “achieved over £25 million each”. Francis Bacon’s Figure in Movement, of 1978, made £17,185,000, and a second Mondrian, Composition A, with Double Line and Yellow, of 1935, made $12.9 million. Liubov Popova’s Painterly Architectonic, of 1918, set an auction record for the artist at $10.1 million. A David Hockney, Dog Painting 17, drew a four-way contest that lasted several minutes before selling for $4.67 million, according to Artnet.
Mondrian in The Hague, London and Rome
For anyone who wants to see Mondrian rather than buy him, the address is The Hague. The Kunstmuseum Den Haag, in a building by H.P. Berlage, describes its holding as the largest collection of Mondrians in the world. Since 10 October it has shown Mondrian & The Road to Abstraction, with Victory Boogie Woogie as the centrepiece. That painting, made in New York between 1942 and 1944, was acquired in 1998 with a gift from De Nederlandsche Bank and has been on long-term loan to the museum ever since. Mondrian was born in Amersfoort in 1872 and died in New York in 1944. In London, Tate holds one of the five museum paintings of 1920. In Rome, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, on the edge of the Villa Borghese gardens, holds another.
Sotheby’s and Phillips on Thursday evening
The London week continues on Thursday 15 October. Phillips holds its Modern & Contemporary Art Evening Sale at 5pm in Berkeley Square, 23 lots led by Gerhard Richter’s Mathis, of 1983, estimated at £6 million to £8 million, according to Phillips. Banksy’s Keep Ou T, of 2019, comes to auction for the first time at £1.2 million to £1.8 million. Sotheby’s Contemporary Evening Auction, the same evening, is led by a Willem de Kooning, Untitled, of 1977, at £8 million to £12 million, with Richter’s Abstraktes Bild of 1992 at £6 million to £8 million and a Mark Rothko of 1969 at £3 million to £4 million. Sotheby’s opened its own week on 14 October with its Modern British & Irish evening sale, where Paul Henry’s The Potato Harvest set a record for the artist at £883,200. Christie’s Modern British evening follows on 21 October, led by Barbara Hepworth’s Eos.
The Luxury.it perspective
Mondrian finished only eight major canvases in 1920, and five of them are in museums. That is the real story of this sale: a painting from the year his abstraction found its rules, offered for the first time, and bought for £25.2 million inside its estimate. For collectors, the signal is about London. The October sales now carry their own weight, with £218.6 million at Christie’s in a single evening, and Frieze week has become a moment for works of this rank, not only New York in November. For everyone else, the way to see that breakthrough year is a day in The Hague, an afternoon at Tate, or a morning in Rome at the Galleria Nazionale, which holds one of the five.
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Art Basel Paris and Frieze London 2026 · Turner’s Rome, from Mount Aventine · Van Gogh at Sotheby’s · Renoir and Love at the National Gallery
