Short of space, the Guggenheim sold a Kandinsky for $62,000. It may fetch $80 million at auction

By Oscar Holland, CNN

Some 15 years after Solomon R. Guggenheim died, the foundation managing his extensive art collection concluded that it owned more Wassily Kandinsky paintings than it knew what to do with.

The late American businessman had been among the Russian painter’s most prominent and dedicated patrons. But in 1964, despite operating its namesake museum in Manhattan, Guggenheim’s foundation placed 50 of its 170 Kandinsky works — characteristically colorful, geometric takes on abstraction — on sale “for want of space.”

Announcing the decision, his nephew, Harry F. Guggenheim, said trustees feared the art would otherwise remain hidden away “in our vaults,” according to reports at the time. “We have concluded that this should not be the fate of these paintings,” he added.

It was a noble sentiment but perhaps, in hindsight, a costly one.

At a London auction later that year, the 50 paintings fetched a combined £536,580, then equivalent to around $1.5 million. Many of them have since reappeared on the market at significantly higher prices. And now one of the works — “Betonte Ecken,” which in 1964 attracted a winning bid of just £22,000 (then around $62,000, or $540,000 in today’s money) from a New York art dealer — is returning to auction with an estimate of $60 million to $80 million.

“The Guggenheim had such an embarrassment of riches back then,” said Max Carter, global chairman of 20th and 21st century art at Christie’s, the auction house behind this month’s sale. The foundation “sold tremendous masterpieces, which would be unthinkable to sell today,” he added, speaking over the phone from New York.

“Betonte Ecken” is not just poised to break the auction record for Kandinsky’s work — it is certain to do so. Christie’s said a guarantor has confirmed an offer exceeding the record £37.2 million ($44.55 million) paid for his painting “Murnau mit Kirche II” in 2023.

The dramatic appreciation in the value of Kandinsky’s work is a testament to his status in today’s art market. While his reputation was well-established by the time of the Guggenheim sale (at which point he had already been dead for two decades), “Betonte Ecken” was, then, “still very forward-looking,” Carter said. “Now it’s become canonical,” he added, calling the painting “quintessential” Kandinsky.

“If you were to go on the street and ask the first 10 people who’d heard of Kandinsky to close their eyes and describe what one of his masterpieces looked like, it would be this.”

Color, complexity, composition

A major figure in the emergence of abstraction in the 1910s, Kandinsky painted “Betonte Ecken” between December 1922 and January 1923. It is a key period in the artist’s career — and the abstract movement at large — that is responsible for some of his most sought-after works.

Following a seven-year stint in his native Russia, Kandinsky had just returned to Germany, where he lived before the outbreak of World War I. His art had increasingly clashed with the anti-bourgeois ideology of the new Soviet regime (he would also later be branded a degenerate by the Nazis), so he accepted an invitation to teach theory at the famous Bauhaus school in Weimar.

Painted shortly after his arrival, “Betonte Ecken” typifies Kandinsky’s highly theoretical approach to form and geometry. Its complexity, color and composition all “synthesize everything that came before it,” Carter said. “For some collectors, this is his greatest and most important period,” he added.

The painting also speaks to the influential role of music in Kandinsky’s oeuvre. He famously chose an art career after attending a Wagner concert at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre in 1896. (“I saw all my colors in my mind; they stood before my eyes,” he later wrote of the experience. “Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me”). As well as featuring black lines resembling those of a musical score, “Betonte Ecken” is also “symphonic” in a less literal sense, Carter said.

“When you stand in front of this painting, the relation of all of these disparate shapes and elements — which in the hands of an inferior artist would be chaotic and jumbled and perhaps incoherent — are extremely harmonious,” he said, adding: “It’s really about the relations of the forms to one another.”

Painted on a square canvas more than 4.25 feet tall and wide, “Betonte Ecken” (which is German for “Emphasized Corners”) is unusually large for a Kandinsky. The relative rarity of his work has also influenced its value, said Carter.

Compared to his contemporaries, Kandinsky was not especially prolific. While there is no exact figure for his output, one catalogue raisonné — a scholarly compendium of an artist’s known works — lists fewer than 1,200 oil paintings. (By contrast, one of Pablo Picasso’s catalogues raisonnés contains more than 16,000 paintings and drawings.) Of these, many are housed by institutions that would, now, never dream of selling them.

Among them, still, is the Guggenheim, which has since acquired new Kandinsky works and currently owns more than 150. The museum may have lost millions of dollars’ worth of masterpieces from its balance sheet, but it arguably retained its most iconic examples, including the famous “Komposition VIII.” As the great collector’s nephew said ahead of the 1964 sale, the foundation only auctioned off paintings that could “reasonably be released without diminishing the standing of the museum’s permanent collection.”

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