The Abstract That Set Piet Mondrian's Auction Record (Twice)

Piet Mondrian, Composition No. II (1930), sold for $51m at Sotheby's in New York on November 14, 2022. The oil on canvas in artist's frame work had been traded 9 times in the past.

Painted in Paris in 1930, the painting survived WW2 in France, belatedly following the artist to the US in 1950. Declared "degenerate" by the Nazis, the Dutch artist had had to flee his celebrated Paris studio, first to London and then on to New York, where he died in 1944.

In 1950, the painting was bought by the Modern architect Armand Bartos. Widely exhibited, it was featured in the artist's centenary exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1971. In the 1983 sale of works from the Armand and Celeste Bartos collection at Christie's, Composition No. II was bought by a Japanese bank, which paid more than $2m for the painting, a record for Mondrian and abstract art.

The sale just beat Mondrian's previous auction record by $435,000, a 0% rise. The previous record was set by Composition No. Iii, With Red, Blue, Yellow, And Black, 1929 (1929), which sold for $50.56m at Christie's on May 14, 2015. The work had been traded 6 times in the past.

Mondrian's 1929 painting is the first geometric abstract in a sequence of nine paintings, all close variations on the same theme, many of which are now in museum collections. They were painted in Paris where the influential Dutch artist first perfected his signature compositions of straight black lines and planes of primary color and “non-color”, white, black and grey.

A Brief History of Mondrian at Auction