WASSILY KANDINSKY (1866 –1944) – Betonte Ecken. (Accentuated Corners)
Kandinsky’s Betonte Ecken is expected to set a new auction record for the artist at Christie’s in New York on November 17. Estimated at $60-$80 million it follows fast on the heels of the London evening sales last week where his 1907 work Das bunte Leben made £31,560,000 ($42 million) and was the top lot of the October season. In Betonte Ecken, painted in Weimar in December 1922-January 1923, the Russian artist attempts to map melody, rhythm and harmony through colour, line and geometry. It was painted at a key moment in the emergence of abstract art.
Monumental in scale and ambition this is a declaration of Kandinsky’s groundbreaking formal language. Formerly in the Guggenheim Museum collection and fresh off the walls of the 2025 Museum Barberini Kandinsky exhibition in Potsdam and the April-August 2026 Calder exhibition in Paris it comes to market from a European collection. The record for a Kandinsky is held by Murnau mit Kirche II (1910) which sold for £37.2 million at Sotheby’s in London in 2023.
(See posts on antiquesandartireland.com for October 7, 2026 and March 2, 2023)