Christie's offers Piet Mondrian's Composition III for the first time at £20m–£30m

What happened

Christie's offers Piet Mondrian's Composition III (1920) at its London 20th/21st Century evening sale on 14 October, with an estimate of £20m–£30m. It is the first time the painting has appeared on the market.

Christie's says the estimate is the highest for a Mondrian at auction in Europe since 2009. The Art Newspaper reports that the work has not been publicly exhibited for 25 years, and notes that Mondrian made just eight major paintings in 1920.

The painting was previously owned by the architect and collector Armand P. Bartos and his wife Celeste. In 2009, according to Finestre sull'Arte, Christie's Paris sold two Mondrians from the Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé collection.

The second headline lot is Wassily Kandinsky's Das bunte Leben (1907), which The Art Newspaper says carries an estimate in excess of US$30m. Emanuel Albert Lewenstein and his wife acquired it in 1927.

It was on loan to the Stedelijk Museum when it was removed and sold at auction in October 1940, shortly after the German invasion.

Bayerische Landesbank acquired the work from the family of the 1940 buyer, Salomon B. Slijper, in 1972. It lent the painting to the Lenbachhaus in Munich in 1973, where it was displayed for more than 50 years. The Lewenstein heirs sued the bank in 2017 and secured restitution in June 2023.

The 14 October sale is its first appearance on the market since then.

The sale falls in Frieze week in London, and public viewing there began on 8 October. Christie's showed Composition III in Zurich, Paris, New York and Hong Kong in September. Both figures are pre-sale estimates, not results.