Mondrian’s £30m masterpiece up for auction at Christie’s in London

“We are delighted to celebrate Mondrian’s extraordinary legacy and present his 1920 masterpiece to London,” said Keith Gill, Christie’s Vice President for 20th and 21st Century Art. According to Gill, the work belongs to the “turning point” of the artist’s career, when Mondrian developed a new abstract and radical language destined to profoundly transform the lexicon of modern art.

The sale represents a particularly significant event also due to the rarity of the work on the market. Composition III had in fact never been offered at auction before and Christie’s considers it among the most important and rare Mondrian paintings ever to come onto the market. The precedents confirm the high economic interest for the artist. In 2009, Christie’s beat two works by Mondrian from the collection of the designer Yves Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Bergé: “Composition avec bleu, rouge, jaune et noir” from 1922, sold for 27.9 million dollars, and “Composition I” from 1920, sold for 9 million. The record for a work by Mondrian belongs to “Composition No. II” from 1930, sold at Sotheby’s in New York in 2022 for 51 million dollars. More recently, in 2025, Christie’s sold “Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue” from 1922 in New York for $47.6 million, including commissions. (by Paolo Martini)