Small 1920 Hilma af Klint canvas heads to Stockholm auction
A 38.5cm by 29cm abstract painting by Hilma af Klint will be sold at Bukowskis in Stockholm on 19 November. The auction house has set an estimate, the published price guide issued before bidding starts, of SEK6 million to SEK8 million, around US$600,000 to US$800,000, according to The Art Newspaper. It is a small canvas. The asking range is large.
The work is titled Ser III No. It is made in oil and graphite on canvas and dated January 1920. An estimate is not a sale price. It is the range the house publishes to guide bidding.
The painting's provenance, the documented chain of ownership, has stayed stable for three decades. It was bought by a private collector in 1995 after it was deaccessioned, formally removed from a collection for sale, by the Hilma af Klint Foundation. It has remained in the same hands since, according to The Art Newspaper. Provenance matters to bidders because it helps establish title and history.
The foundation was set up in 1972 by Erik af Klint. He was the artist's nephew and heir. Sales from the foundation in the 1990s put a small number of works into private hands, and this picture has not appeared at auction since that transfer.
If bidding reaches the low estimate, the result would move well beyond the current auction record for the artist. That record stands at US$165,825 for The Power of the Spleen, a 1931 watercolour on paper sold at Stockholms Auktionsverk in Stockholm in 2019, according to The Art Newspaper. An auction record is simply the highest published price paid at auction to date. A price near the SEK6 million low guide would be roughly four times that level.
Earlier sales were much lower. A 1930 watercolour of a burning heart sold at auction for US$2,000 to a private bidder in 1988, according to artnet News. The same work was later given an estimate of US$300,000 to US$500,000 when it returned to the market. The two numbers sit on either side of a period in which large public exhibitions brought the artist to a wider audience.
What makes this stand out is the paper trail. Many high-value pictures arrive with gaps in their history. Here the seller's history runs in one line from the foundation sale in 1995 to Bukowskis in Stockholm this November. For anyone watching from a phone, that leaves a simple question for sale night: how far past the old record will bidding go?
