Christie’s to offer Kandinsky painting for $60–80 million — Asharq Al-Awsat

Christie’s will offer Vasyl Kandinsky’s painting Betonte Ecken with an estimate of $60 million to $80 million. The guaranteed bid for the work already exceeds the artist’s auction record of £37.2 million, or $44.55 million, paid in 2023 for the painting Murnau mit Kirche II, Asharq Al-Awsat reports.

The 1964 sale

In 1964, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation sold Betonte Ecken at an auction in London for £22,000. At the time, this amount was approximately $62,000, or about $540,000 in today’s money. The buyer was a New York art dealer.

That same year, the foundation put 50 of the 170 Kandinsky works in its collection up for sale. According to CNN, the reason was a lack of space. Harry F. Guggenheim, Solomon R. Guggenheim’s nephew, said that the foundation’s trustees did not want the paintings to remain in storage.

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The Guggenheim collection

At the 1964 London auction, the 50 Kandinsky works sold for a total of £536,580 — approximately $1.5 million at the exchange rate of the time. Since then, many of them have reappeared on the market at significantly higher prices.

Max Carter, Christie’s global head of 20th and 21st century art, called the Guggenheim collection extraordinarily rich and noted that selling such works today would be unthinkable. According to him, in 1964 Betonte Ecken was still considered a highly innovative work, while it has now become a canonical Kandinsky work.