Christie’s sets its sights on a new Kandinsky record
Estimated at $60m-$80m, Betonte Ecken comes to New York with a Guggenheim provenance and a reported third-party guarantee.
A Kandinsky once owned by the Guggenheim is heading to Christie’s in New York with an estimate that would carry the artist into a new price bracket. Betonte Ecken, painted in 1922-23, will be offered in the 20th Century Evening Sale on 17 November at $60m-$80m.
The ambition is already backed by a financial commitment. According to Marion Maneker’s report in Puck, the painting carries a third-party guarantee, securing a buyer at an agreed level before the auction begins. That figure has not been disclosed. The guarantee gives Christie’s support for a conspicuous piece of pricing, while leaving the extent of any competition above it to the evening itself.
The title translates as Accentuated Corners. Kandinsky painted the work in Weimar shortly after joining the Bauhaus, where Walter Gropius had invited him to teach. Its geometries belong to a period in which lines, angles and areas of colour assumed an increasingly deliberate relationship. Music remained a point of reference: forms could establish rhythms and tensions without describing a recognisable scene.
The painting’s early ownership connects it to the American reception of that ambition. It was the first Kandinsky acquired by Hilla Rebay, the artist and advocate of non-objective painting who became the Guggenheim’s founding director. The museum acquired it from her in 1941 and sold it in the mid-1960s. It now comes from a European private collection.
The Guggenheim retains Composition 8, completed in July 1923, to which Betonte Ecken is closely related. Both belong to a period of increasingly precise geometries, as Kandinsky explored how a painting could be organised through the relationships between its constituent shapes and colours.
Christie’s announcement follows its London sale of Das bunte Leben, a much earlier picture from 1907, for £31.6m including fees on 14 October. The existing auction record belongs to Murnau mit Kirche II of 1910, which made £37.2m including fees, approximately $45m at the time, at Sotheby’s in 2023. A result within the New York estimate would leave that benchmark behind.
That earlier record was itself supported by a guarantee. The Art Newspaper reported that Murnau mit Kirche II sold on a single telephone bid from its guarantor. This time, too, a backer has reportedly made the first commitment. On 17 November, the interest will be in how much competition follows.
