Mondrian's Composition III, Valued at £20–30 Million, Heads to Auction for the First Time at Christie's London
A Mondrian painting worth an estimated £20–30 million will come to auction for the first time this October, Christie's announced on 26 August 2026.
Piet Mondrian's Composition III, painted in 1920, will be a headline lot in Christie's 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale on 14 October 2026, timed to Frieze Week — the annual October art fair that turns the British capital into a global market hub. Christie's has placed an estimate of £20,000,000–30,000,000 on the canvas, and described it as one of the most significant works by the artist ever to appear at auction. ARTnews reported the painting's valuation at approximately £20 million. (ARTnews)
This is the most important Mondrian offered at auction in Europe since 2009, when two works from the Collection of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé — Composition avec bleu, rouge, jaune et noir (1922) and Composition I (1920) — sold at Christie's Paris. (Christie's)
Composition III has never before been to market. Its past custodians include the architect and Modernism collector Armand P. Bartos and his wife Celeste, according to Christie's. The painting's documented chain of ownership — provenance, in the trade's shorthand — now leads to the London saleroom for its first public sale.
Mondrian painted the work in 1920, the year he settled back in Paris after spending the First World War in the Netherlands. That year he completed just eight landmark paintings; five of them now hang in the Tate in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, and the Wilhelm-Hack Museum in Ludwigshafen. Composition III is one of the three still in private hands.
The canvas uses only the colours permitted by Mondrian's Neo-Plastic system — the three primaries red, yellow and blue, plus black, white and grey, arranged in a grid of intersecting lines. The theory behind that system reached a wider audience the following year, when the art dealer Léonce Rosenberg published Mondrian's essay Le Néo-Plasticisme as a pamphlet in 1921, the first time his ideas appeared in French. Christie's notes that Composition III embodies the moment Mondrian's painting and his published theory converged.
For collectors and institutions, the sale is a rare thing: a major Mondrian with a museum-grade pedigree and no auction history. The last comparable offering in Europe was seventeen years ago. Where the bidding lands on 14 October will be one of the numbers the art world watches most closely this autumn.
