An $80 M. Kandinsky, Once Owned by the Guggenheim, Is Guaranteed to Beat a Record at Christie’s
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Russian-born abstraction pioneer Wassily Kandinsky‘s painting Betonte Ecken (1922–23) will come to the auction block at Christie’s New York on November 17, carrying a $60 million to $80 million estimate. The anonymous seller acquired the work at Sotheby’s New York in 1986. The painting is guaranteed to sell at a record-setting level, the house told ARTnews.
Kandinsky’s auction record currently stands at $44.8 million, paid for the artist’s 1910 painting Murnau mit Kirche II (Murnau with Church II) at Sotheby’s London in 2023. Just last month, Christie’s London notched the third-highest price for the artist with his 1907 canvas Das bunte Leben (La vie mélangée), which sold for $41.5 million against a $30 million estimate. That work had recently been restituted to the heirs of a Jewish Dutch collector family whose art was lost during the Nazi era. The artist’s top 14 works at auction all exceed the $20 million mark, and 10 of those prices have been set in the past decade.
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