Christie's London double-header makes £218.6m, led by Kandinsky's Das bunte Leben

Two back-to-back sales at Christie's on King Street, London, raised a combined £178m before fees and £218.6m with fees on the evening of 14 October 2026, according to figures reported by The Art Newspaper.

The night paired the house's 20th/21st Century Evening Sale with Monsoon, an evening sale drawn from the personal collection of Peter Simon. The two sales started at 6pm BST during Frieze week in London, when art fairs and auctions bring international collectors to the city.

The top lot was Wassily Kandinsky's 1907 painting Das bunte Leben. It sold for a £27m hammer price, the bid the auctioneer closes on before fees, or £31.6m with fees. That cleared its £25m high estimate.

The painting carries a difficult history. It was restituted, or formally returned, to the heirs of German Jewish collector Hedwig Lewenstein-Weyermann in June 2023. Provenance, the documented chain of ownership, has become central to how major older works are bought and sold.

Piet Mondrian's 1920 Composition III followed close behind. It sold for £21.5m hammer, or £25.2m with fees, against an estimate of £20m-£30m.

The Monsoon evening sale alone totalled £86.9m before fees and £107.5m with fees. Christie's published the full total as £107,508,800, or $142,341,651 / €127,075,402, in its sale results. That makes it the highest-value single-owner collection ever sold at Christie's London.

Francis Bacon's 1978 Figure in Movement led the Monsoon group. It sold for £14.5m hammer, or £17.2m with fees. Three other works then stacked up quickly behind it.

Piet Mondrian's Composition A, with Double Line and Yellow from 1935 sold for £8m hammer, or £9.7m with fees. Joan Miró's 1925 Peinture (Les amants – Adam et Eve) sold for £7m hammer, or £8.6m with fees. Liubov Popova's 1918 Painterly Architectonic sold for £6.2m hammer, or £7.6m with fees, a record price for the artist.

Bidding ran deep. All 41 lots in the Monsoon evening sale carried guarantees, a promise to the seller that the work will sell for a minimum sum. Christie's guaranteed 11 lots itself and outside investors, known as third parties, guaranteed the rest. The sale achieved a 98% sell-through rate, meaning almost every lot found a buyer, and 43% of lots sold above the high estimate.

Monsoon brings together nearly 200 works from Simon's collection. Christie's put the full collection on public view from 26 September to 1 October ahead of the October sales. A day sale was scheduled for 15 October 2026, with an online sale running from 1 to 20 October, as outlined in Christie's collection preview.

What makes this stand out is the mix. One half of the night was a standard seasonal sale. The other half was a single person's taste, tested lot by lot in public. On this night, the single collection held its share of the room.