Christie's gives Frieze week to its 20th/21st Century series at 8 King Street, 14 to 21 October 2026, led by Mondrian's Composition III and Kandinsky's Das bunte Leben.
Christie’s was founded by James Christie in 1766 and has sold from King Street in St James’s since 1823. Its twentieth and twenty-first century departments now carry the house, and the London series each October is the point at which the whole of Europe’s supply of major modern pictures is tested in one week. The house took 6.2 billion dollars across its sales in 2025.
An evening sale of this kind is assembled over a year and travels before it is called. This one turns on two paintings: Mondrian’s Composition III, one of eight canvases he finished in 1920 as he moved into Neo-Plasticism, and the most important Mondrian offered at auction in Europe since 2009; and Kandinsky’s Das bunte Leben of 1907, painted during a long stay in Paris and dense with Russian folklore. Both went to Zurich, Paris, New York and Hong Kong before coming back for the London view.
The 2026 series runs from Wednesday 14 to Wednesday 21 October at 8 King Street, with the view open from Thursday 8 October to the fifteenth. Das bunte Leben was restituted to the heirs of Hedwig Lewenstein-Weyermann in June 2023. Provenance of that kind is now part of what an evening sale is selling, and a restitution settled before the catalogue is printed is worth more to a buyer than any estimate.