Christies 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale on 14 October 2026

Christie’s will host its 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale on 14 October 2026, celebrating the revolutionary threads of art-making that have defined this transformative period in history.Leading the sale are masterworks by two of the leading pioneers of the early twentieth century – Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. Rich in symbolism, Kandinsky’s 1907 composition Das bunte Leben is filled with a kaleidoscopic play of vivid colour and vitalistic energy, and presents a panoramic, romantic view of the often conflicting and contrasting aspects of the human experience – love and loss, joy and sadness, conflict and harmony. Mondrian’s Composition III, meanwhile, offers a contrastingly minimalist vision, reducing his focus to the internal tensions of geometric planes of pure colour set within a linear grid. Painted in 1920, this is a key breakthrough work in Mondrian’s career, showcasing the core principles of his pioneering abstract language known as Neo-Plasticism.The Post-War and Contemporary selection features major works by artists including Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Gerhard Richter and Domenico Gnoli. Many of these come from important private collections, including Property from the Matthys-Colle Collection, The Collection of Senator and Mrs. Thomas F. Eagleton and New Horizons: Property from a West Coast Collection. Other highlights include David Hockney’s painting of his dachshund, Stanley – all the more poignant after the artist’s passing this summer – and a rare, large-scale self-portrait by Albert Oehlen, made in the heady days of 1980s Cologne.Christie’s is also delighted to present Radiant Modernism: Signac to Albers, a Private European Collection of late-nineteenth to twentieth-century art spanning paintings, works on paper and prints, which will be offered across multiple sales and regions from October 2026 throughout 2027. The collection is debuted in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale with an important group of works by Josef Albers and Paul Signac’s Sainte-Anne (Saint-Tropez) (1905). A hymn to the South of France, which Paul Signac loved and where he made his home, Sainte-Anne (Saint-Tropez) (estimate: £4,500,000-6,500,000), is a 1905 landscape showing the evening light caressing the trees, buildings and distant hills. The port of Saint-Tropez is situated in the lower centre of the picture, the bell tower being clearly visible and forming a silhouette against the turquoise sea. This painting, with its subtle treatment of light and vivid colours, was admired by the artist himself and his contemporaries, as it featured in a number of important early exhibitions of Signac's work, including his 1907 retrospective at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune. The importance of Sainte-Anne is also reflected in its provenance: it was formerly in the collection of Gustave Fayet, one of the most important supporters of the avant-garde in the early 20th century, as well as an early patron of Post-Impressionism, particularly Paul Gauguin. The timing of the painting's presentation at auction is especially significant, underscoring its continued relevance within the current cultural zeitgeist. On 9 October, Fondation Louis Vuitton will open Gustave Fayet, Collector-Designer. Icons of Modern Art, while the Royal Academy of Arts in London will launch Painting the French Riviera on 2 October, an exhibition exploring how the Côte d'Azur captivated and inspired modern art's great innovators.Sainte-Anne (Saint-Tropez) will be offered in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale on 14 October 2026.Piet Mondrian's Composition III will be one of the key highlights of its 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale on 14 October 2026 during Frieze Week. Carrying an estimate of £20,000,000-30,000,000, this masterwork is the most important Mondrian offered at auction in Europe since 2009, when Composition avec bleu, rouge, jaune et noir (1922) and Composition I (1920) were sold at Christie's Paris from the Collection of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé.Composition III comes to auction for the first time, with past custodians including the legendary architect and collector of Modernism Armand P. Bartos and his wife Celeste.Painted in 1920, Composition III dates to a pivotal moment in the artist's career, as he achieved the first breakthrough examples of his visionary Neo-Plastic style. That year, Mondrian completed just eight landmark paintings, five of which are now held in internationally renowned museum collections: Tate, London; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome; and the Wilhelm-Hack Museum, Ludwigshafen.Composition III stands as a clear expression of intent, and embodies Mondrian's newly crystallised artistic vision. After returning to Paris in late 1919 having spent the First World War in the Netherlands, Mondrian once again engaged with the city's avant-garde scene. This period marked a crucial turning point in his practice, in which he embraced a completely new aesthetic. Throughout 1920, he systematically established the principles of his pioneering abstract language – known as Neo-Plasticism – and achieved a powerful and coherent formulation of his ideas. At the same time, he was working on his seminal essay 'Le Néo-Plasticisme: Principe général de l'équivalence plastique,' which was published the following year as a pamphlet by Léonce Rosenberg, marking the first time Mondrian's influential theories were available in French.The paintings produced in 1920 present the dynamic development of Mondrian's ideas, as he distilled his works down to their most essential components: he focused on the interaction of a series of strictly linear, geometric forms on the canvas, the boundaries of the shapes marked by graphic lines, and his palette consisting only of a few essential colours. This sense of visual simplicity was the result of a wider philosophical belief: Mondrian thought that by reducing painting to its basic elements - such as pure areas of carefully calibrated colours and lines - he could convey a sense of universal harmony and explore the fundamental laws that govern the universe.Mondrian's works from this defining year reflect a painstaking creation process in which theory and intuition progressed together. He would work on one composition over a number of months, letting the paint dry between each stage, and at various points stepping back to think over the alterations he had made. Instead of using an easel, he painted with the canvas spread out on a table, which he positioned close to a window for the best light, and kept the easel for when he was reviewing the work, so that he could look at the composition from a distance.Composition III gives tangible expression to all this. The work only employs the colours allowed by Mondrian's Neo-Plastic system: namely the three primary colours, red, yellow and blue, together with black, white and grey - arranged in a dynamic grid made up of lines whose tone subtly changes as they cross the surface of the canvas. The bold passages of red and blue are counterbalanced by planes of bright, almost acidic yellow and delicately gradated greys, each panel showing several layers of pigment and clear traces of brushwork, revealing the artist's hand. Mondrian added a layer of varnish to only the black panels within the work, which enhanced the saturation and luminosity of the pigment and produced a captivating contrast against the other colour planes. At the centre, a yellow square aligned on the axis of symmetry creates an outward-moving energy, bringing rhythm and balance to the whole composition.Keith Gill, Vice Chairman 20/21 at Christie's: “We are delighted to celebrate Mondrian's extraordinary legacy and present his masterpiece from 1920, Composition III, in London, where another key work from this pivotal year resides, in the collection of the Tate. Composition III dates from the breakthrough moment in Mondrian's career, in which he reached a new, radical abstract idiom that profoundly reshaped the language of modern art. Appearing at auction for the first time in its history, it ranks among the most important and rarest of his paintings ever to come to market.”Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), Composition III, 1920. Oil on canvas. 21 x 20⅛ in (53.4 x 51.2 cm). Estimate: £20,000,000-30,000,000. Offered in the 20th/21st Century: Evening Sale on 14 October 2026 at Christie’s in LondonDas bunte Leben (1907): a monumental turning point on Kandinsky’s road to abstractionIn this mysterious panoramic landscape teeming with life — influenced both by Russian folklore and Fauvism — the artist emulates his Parisian peers’ scenes of utopia, exploring the richness of human experience.Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Das bunte Leben (La vie mélangée), 1907. Tempera and gouache on canvas. 51⅜ x 64⅛ in (130.5 x 162.6 cm). Estimate on request. Offered in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale on 14 October 2026 at Christie’s in LondonIn May 1906, the artists Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter arrived in Paris. The pair, who were also lovers, had spent much of the previous three years travelling together through Europe and North Africa. Now they settled into a property on the Rue des Ursulines, in the 5th arrondissement.Their aim was to immerse themselves in the fervent Parisian art scene, where avant-garde painters — from the Post-Impressionists to the Fauves — were at work. The impact on Kandinsky was marked, and it was in such a context that he produced the monumental painting Das bunte Leben, in 1907.Within a few years, he would establish himself as one of the pioneers of Western abstraction, and this picture marks a major turning point in his oeuvre. On 14 October 2026, the work will be offered in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale at Christie’s in London.Of the works made around the time of Das bunte Leben, Kandinsky said that he wanted to ‘let the viewer take a stroll within the picture’ and ‘become absorbed’ in it. In this particular case, one strolls into a mysterious panoramic landscape teeming with life.People of various ages and backgrounds gather together in a semi-rural setting: from pilgrims and peasants, beggars and monks, to a mother cradling her young child, each of them dressed in vividly patterned clothing. No clear narrative thread unites them. However, activity abounds, in a set of intriguing vignettes.Kandinsky painted the scene in distinct compositional bands, leading our eye from figures in the foreground to a walled town crowning a hill in the distance. The figures include an aged traveller with a walking stick, and a pipe-player (on the right) who creates a festive atmosphere, while those around her eat, revel and chat.That atmosphere doesn’t extend to the area directly behind them, though, where a handful of men are engaged in heated argument. Behind those men, in turn, is the more startling sight of a battle between a crowd of figures with spears. A mother and child are among the many colourfully clothed figures depicted by Kandinsky in Das bunte Leben A broad sweep of human life is represented, from a happy musician in the foreground, via a pair of lovers, to a funeral procession in the distanceNewly settled in Paris, Kandinsky and Münter attended numerous art exhibitions and got to know dealers, gallerists and collectors aplenty. The collectors included the expatriate American siblings Leo and Gertrude Stein, who acquired Henri Matisse’s picture Le Bonheur de vivre after its successful showing at the Salon des Indépendants early in 1906. Leo went so far as to describe it as ‘the most important painting of our age’. This joyful scene depicts a set of nude figures reclining and frolicking together in an Arcadian landscape.It’s possible that Kandinsky saw the painting on a visit to the Steins’ apartment. In any case, he would have been aware of a trend in contemporary Paris for art exploring the richness of human life through scenes set in utopias. Other examples include Paul Signac’s Au temps d’Harmonie and André Derain’s