Christie’s Frieze Week Sales Net More Than £218m, Including Single-Owner Collection Record

As Frieze London and Frieze Masters closed their doors in Regent’s Park yesterday evening following a busy first day of sales, over on King Street things were just getting started.

In total, Christie’s back-to-back 20th/21st Century London Evening Sale and Peter Simon Collection Evening Sale raised £218.6 million—more than doubling last year’s total of £106.9 million, and exceeding the £197.5 million raised by the auction house’s three March evening auctions earlier this year. 

The evening’s highest price was achieved by Wassily Kandinsky’s Das bunte Leben (1907), which fetched £31.56 million (all prices include fees) in the various-owner sale. The work dates to the artist’s 1906–1907 stay in Paris with leading expressionist Gabriele Münter, when visits to exhibitions and galleries brought him into sustained contact with Post-Impressionism and Fauvism.

Kandinsky’s small landscapes of this period earned him a reputation as a dilettante in Paris. Das bunte Leben, exhibited at the Salon d’Automne that October, shows a different scale of ambition. 

Pilgrims, lovers and a funeral procession populate a panorama that combines Russian folklore with his Parisian experiments in colour. Sweeping strokes in the mother-and-child group and the traveller’s mint-green beard contrast with the mosaic-like marks on the figures’ garments.

The painting’s return to auction follows its restitution to the heirs of Hedwig Lewenstein-Weyermann in June 2023. Sold in occupied Amsterdam in October 1940, it subsequently spent almost five decades on loan to Munich’s Lenbachhaus.

Piet Mondrian’s Composition III (1920) achieved the next-highest price at £25.24 million. Making its auction debut, it is one of eight paintings he completed in 1920 as he established his Neo-Plastic vocabulary; five are now in museum collections.

Monsoon: The Peter Simon Collection Evening Sale brought in £107.5 million, a record for a single-owner collection sold at Christie’s London and representing almost half the evening’s proceeds. Francis Bacon’s Figure in Movement (1978), acquired by Simon from dealer and fellow collector Ivor Braka in 2006, led at £17.19 million.

Bacon’s contorted figure, which has been linked to his lover George Dyer, occupies a space flattened into an orange wall, a pale floor and a black mirror. The familiar white cage-like contours are absent. A violet shadow spreads beneath the body, while the reflection doubles its twisting anatomy.

Bacon described the work to critic David Sylvester as “an attempt to make a figure in movement as concentrated as I could do it”. The work appeared in the artist’s 1985 retrospective at the Tate Gallery and Francis Bacon: The Human Body at the Hayward Gallery in 1998.

Simon’s interest in painting grew out of textiles. Before opening his first Monsoon shop in 1973, he sold crocheted coats on Portobello Road and travelled to Rajasthan for hand-block-printed fabrics. Years spent selecting textile designs trained his eye for colour and composition, later finding an outlet in works by Howard Hodgkin, Bridget Riley and others.

Riley’s Streak 2 (1979), an optical painting of undulating horizontal stripes, set a new auction record for the artist at £5.21 million. Further records went to David Bomberg’s San Miguel, Toledo, Afternoon (1929), at £3.26 million, and Portia Zvavahera’s This is where I travelled [3] (2020), at £307,200.

Liubov Popova’s Painterly Architectonic (1918) set another artist record at £7.64 million after almost eight minutes of bidding.

As Frieze week continues, so to do the London marquee sales. Later today Sotheby’s will host its Contemporary Evening Auction, offering works by Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko and Georg Baselitz, alongside Willem de Kooning’s Untitled (1977), which goes under the hammer with a top estimate of £12 million.