The London auction house Christie’s brought in $289.4 million over two evening sales on Wednesday, October 14—the 20/21st Century Evening Sale and the “Monsoon,” sale of the collection of Peter Simon. The amount achieved on Wednesday is more than double that of last year’s sales.
The Peter Simon collection set a record for the highest single owner collection ever sold at Christie’s London with a total of $142.3 million after fees. Simon is the founder of British fashion retailers Monsoon and Accessorize. The 41-lot Simon collection included Portia Zvavahera‘s This is where I travelled, 2020, which sold for an artist record of $407,000, and Hurvin Anderson’s Last House, 2013, which sold for $7.5 million. The Simon collection’s most expensive work, Francis Bacon’s Figure in Movement, sold for $22.8 million to a bidder in the room.
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Next up was a multiple-owner sale with 45 lots by modern and contemporary artists. It achieved $147 million. The top lot of the evening was an early Wassily Kandinsky painting, Das bunte Leben (1907), which was recently restituted to the heirs of the German Jewish art collector Hedwig Lewenstein-Weyermann in June 2023. Auctioneer Adrien Meyer called it “the most important early work by the artist to ever come to auction.” It sold for $41.8 million after nearly 20 bids to a client of Maria Los, Christie’s head of client advisory for the Americas.
Bridget Riley and Liubov Popova set records at the auction. Riley’s Streak 2, 1979, sold for $6.9 million. Popova’s Painterly Architectonic, 1918, sold for $10.1 million, nearly four times her previous record in 2007.
“The audience, composed largely of art-market participants, seemed ready to celebrate incremental signs of strength,” Betsy Bickar, head of Citi Wealth’s art advisory told artnet, “Perhaps reflecting a growing sense that a broader market rebound is becoming more plausible.”