{"id":2212943,"date":"2026-10-22T20:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-22T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2212943"},"modified":"2026-10-22T20:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-10-22T17:00:00","slug":"an-80-m-kandinsky-is-guaranteed-to-beat-a-record-at-christies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2212943","title":{"rendered":"An $80 M. Kandinsky Is Guaranteed to Beat a Record at Christie\u2019s"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/Wassily-Kandinsky-Betonte-Ecken-1000.jpg?w=1000″]<\/p>\n

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\n\tRussian-born abstraction pioneer Wassily Kandinsky\u2018s painting Betonte Ecken<\/em> (1922\u201323) will come to the auction block at Christie\u2019s New York on November 17, carrying a $60 million to $80 million estimate. The anonymous seller acquired the work at Sotheby\u2019s New York in 1986. The painting is guaranteed to sell at a record-setting level, the house told ARTnews<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\n\tKandinsky\u2019s auction record currently stands at $44.8 million, paid for the artist\u2019s 1910 painting Murnau mit Kirche II<\/em> (Murnau with Church II<\/em>) at Sotheby\u2019s London in 2023. Just last month, Christie\u2019s London notched the third-highest price for the artist with his 1907 canvas Das bunte Leben<\/em> (La vie m\u00e9lang\u00e9e<\/em>), 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\u2019s top 14 works at auction all exceed the $20 million mark, and 10 of those prices have been set in the past decade.<\/p>\n

\n\tMeasuring just over four feet square, the colorful abstraction, whose title translates as Accentuated Corners<\/em>, was painted in Weimar, Germany, while the artist was teaching at the legendary Bauhaus.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe painting has changed hands a number of times. Christie\u2019s 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\u2019s Galerie Nierendorf, which then sold it, probably in 1929, to Hilla Rebay\u2014adviser 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\u2019s collection until 1964, when the museum sold it at Sotheby\u2019s 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\u2019s in 1986, when it went to the present owner. Sotheby\u2019s did not immediately respond to ARTnews<\/em>\u2018s inquiry about the prices the work fetched in its two previous visits to the block.<\/p>\n

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Wassily Kandinsky, Das bunte Leben<\/i> (1907).<\/span>courtesy Christie\u2019s<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tMusic was key to Kandinsky\u2019s evolution: he abandoned a career in law and economics for art after attending a performance of Richard Wagner\u2019s opera Lohengrin<\/em> at Moscow\u2019s Bolshoi Theatre in 1896, at age 30. \u201cIn spirit I saw all my colors\u2014they stood in front of my mind\u2019s eye,\u201d he later said, per the New York Times<\/em>. \u201cWild, almost mad lines appeared before me. It became quite clear to me that painting could develop the same powers that music possessed.\u201d The experience is at the crux of the current exhibition \u201cKandinsky: La musique des couleurs,\u201d at the Philharmonie de Paris.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIn this masterwork, Kandinsky realizes Wagner\u2019s notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk<\/em>, synthesizing his creativity into a singular, unifying artistic experience,\u201d said Paige Kestenman, co-head of Christie\u2019s 20th-century art evening sale, in press materials. \u201cThis painting not only represents new heights in Kandinsky\u2019s own artistic progression, but also a key moment in the development of abstraction that would influence leading postwar artists and generations to come.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBorn in Moscow in 1866, Kandinsky published the book On the Spiritual in Art<\/em> 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\u2019s Commissariat of Education, until moving to Weimar in 1922. His first New York solo show came in 1923, organized by the Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 Anonyme, the organization founded in 1920 by Marcel Duchamp, Katherine Dreier, and Man Ray.<\/p>\n

\n\tKandinsky 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\u2019s campaign against \u201cdegenerate art.\u201d Kandinsky died in France in December 1944, three days short of his 78th birthday and six months shy of Germany\u2019s surrender to Allied forces.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

[analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/market\/80m-kandinsky-guggenheim-guaranteed-record-christies-1234803586\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/Wassily-Kandinsky-Betonte-Ecken-1000.jpg?w=1000″] Russian-born abstraction pioneer Wassily Kandinsky\u2018s painting Betonte Ecken (1922\u201323) will come to the auction block at Christie\u2019s New York on November 17, carrying a $60 million to $80 million estimate. The anonymous seller acquired the work at Sotheby\u2019s New York in 1986. The painting is guaranteed to sell at a record-setting level, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2212943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2212943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2212943"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2212943\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2212943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2212943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2212943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}