Christie's London Sales Hit £219m as Kandinsky and Mondrian Lead

Christie's October marquee auction week in London, held at its King Street premises on Wednesday 14 October, generated a combined £218.6m with fees (£178m hammer) across two evening sales. The 20th/21st Century Evening Sale totalled £111.1m with fees (£90.5m hammer), slightly above last October's £106.9m and in line with March's £114.2m. The dedicated "Monsoon" sale of Peter Simon's collection brought £107.5m with fees (£86.9m hammer), with all 41 lots guaranteed and a 98% sell-through rate. Wassily Kandinsky's 1907 painting Das bunte Leben, restituted in June 2023 to heirs of Hedwig Lewenstein-Weyermann, was the top lot at £31.6m with fees, sold to a phone bidder represented by Maria Los after six minutes of bidding. Piet Mondrian's 1920 Composition III fetched £25.2m with fees, while Francis Bacon's Figure in Movement (1978) sold for £17.2m with fees to a woman in the room. Liubov Popova's Painterly Architectonic (1918) set a record at £7.6m with fees, nearly four times her previous record. Other records included Bridget Riley (£5.2m), David Bomberg (£3.3m), Portia Zvavahera (£307,200), Barbara Hepworth (£537,600) and Igshaan Adams (£96,000). Hurvin Anderson's Last House (2013) achieved £5.7m with fees, more than double its low estimate. Keith Gill, Christie's vice-chairman, said the results reinforce London's position as a key international market for museum-quality masterpieces.