In 1964 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation sent 50 paintings and works on paper by Wassily Kandinsky to auction in London. One of them, a large abstract canvas called Betonte Ecken (Accented Corners), sold for £22,000, about $62,000 at the time. On Tuesday it returns to the saleroom at Christie’s in New York with an estimate of $60 million to $80 million, and it is widely expected to set a new auction record for the artist.
Why the Guggenheim sold
The museum on Fifth Avenue grew out of Solomon Guggenheim’s passion for what was then called non-objective painting, and Kandinsky was at its heart. By the early 1960s the foundation owned around 170 of his works, far more than it could ever hang at once in Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiral building.
The trustees decided to sell 50 of them. The London sale raised £536,580 in total. The museum’s president, Harry F. Guggenheim, argued that it made no sense to keep paintings hidden away in storage when they could be enjoyed elsewhere.
Betonte Ecken was bought by a New York dealer. In today’s money, its price would be roughly $540,000. A deaccession on that scale from a museum’s founding collection would be almost unthinkable now, and the painting has since spent decades in private hands.
A Bauhaus picture
Kandinsky painted Betonte Ecken between December 1922 and January 1923, shortly after he arrived at the Bauhaus in Weimar to teach. The move marked a turning point in his art. The loose, explosive forms of his pre-war Munich years gave way to circles, triangles, grids and crisp lines, arranged with the precision of a diagram.
The canvas is large, more than four feet on each side, and almost square. Thin black lines run across it like the staves of a musical score, and geometric shapes in strong colours cluster near the corners that give the work its title. Kandinsky, who heard colours as sounds, often compared painting to music, and this is one of the clearest expressions of that idea from his Bauhaus period.
It belongs to the same moment as Komposition VIII (1923), the Guggenheim’s best-known Kandinsky, which never left the collection. The museum still owns more than 150 works by him.
Chasing the record
Kandinsky’s current auction record is £37.2 million ($44.5 million), set in London in 2023 by Murnau mit Kirche II, an expressionist landscape from 1910. Betonte Ecken arrives with a guarantee from a third party who has committed to buy it at a price above that figure, which means a new record is effectively assured unless the sale is withdrawn.
Christie’s specialists describe the painting as one of the defining works of Kandinsky’s Bauhaus years, and its estimate matches that of the week’s other headline Christie’s lot, Gustav Klimt’s Attersee landscape Litzlbergkeller.
If Betonte Ecken lands within its estimate, the work will have increased in value more than a thousandfold since the Guggenheim let it go. The sale takes place at Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale at Rockefeller Center on November 17. For the rest of the week’s highlights, see our guide to the November auctions.