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.
Measuring just over four feet square, the colorful abstraction, whose title translates as Accentuated Corners, was painted in Weimar, Germany, while the artist was teaching at the legendary Bauhaus.
The painting has changed hands a number of times. Christie’s provenance shows it first coming to auction at the Jacob Hecht Auction House in Berlin in 1926, from the Schwarz collection, going to that city’s Galerie Nierendorf, which then sold it, probably in 1929, to Hilla Rebay—adviser to museum founder Solomon R. Guggenheim, an early supporter of abstract art in the US. Guggenheim later acquired it from Rebay, and it remained in the museum’s collection until 1964, when the museum sold it at Sotheby’s London to New York art dealer Stephen Hahn. At some point, Hahn sold it to Boston collectors Sandra and David Bakalar, who put it up for auction at Sotheby’s in 1986, when it went to the present owner. Sotheby’s did not immediately respond to ARTnews‘s inquiry about the prices the work fetched in its two previous visits to the block.
Music was key to Kandinsky’s evolution: he abandoned a career in law and economics for art after attending a performance of Richard Wagner’s opera Lohengrin at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre in 1896, at age 30. “In spirit I saw all my colors—they stood in front of my mind’s eye,” he later said, per the New York Times. “Wild, almost mad lines appeared before me. It became quite clear to me that painting could develop the same powers that music possessed.” The experience is at the crux of the current exhibition “Kandinsky: La musique des couleurs,” at the Philharmonie de Paris.
“In this masterwork, Kandinsky realizes Wagner’s notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk, synthesizing his creativity into a singular, unifying artistic experience,” said Paige Kestenman, co-head of Christie’s 20th-century art evening sale, in press materials. “This painting not only represents new heights in Kandinsky’s own artistic progression, but also a key moment in the development of abstraction that would influence leading postwar artists and generations to come.”
Born in Moscow in 1866, Kandinsky published the book On the Spiritual in Art in 1911 and was part of the influential Blaue Reiter group. After his first solo exhibition, at Der Sturm gallery in Berlin in 1912, one of his works was included in the groundbreaking 1913 Armory Show in New York. He lived in Russia from 1914 to 1921, mainly in Moscow, where he held a position at the People’s Commissariat of Education, until moving to Weimar in 1922. His first New York solo show came in 1923, organized by the Société Anonyme, the organization founded in 1920 by Marcel Duchamp, Katherine Dreier, and Man Ray.
Kandinsky became a German citizen in 1928 but relocated to France when the Nazi government closed the Bauhaus in 1933, becoming a French citizen in 1939. The Nazis seized dozens of his works in the party’s campaign against “degenerate art.” Kandinsky died in France in December 1944, three days short of his 78th birthday and six months shy of Germany’s surrender to Allied forces.