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

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.”

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.

Hugo Erfurth/Heritage Images/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

“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.”

所罗门·R·古根海姆去世约 15 年后，管理他庞大艺术收藏的基金会得出结论：他们拥有的瓦西里·康定斯基的画作数量超过了他们所能处理的。

这位已故的美国商人曾是这位俄罗斯画家最杰出、最忠实的赞助人之一。但在 1964 年，尽管古根海姆基金会在曼哈顿经营着以他名字命名的博物馆，但该基金会还是因为“空间不足”而出售了其收藏的 170 件康定斯基作品中的 50 件——这些作品以其标志性的色彩鲜艳、几何抽象风格而闻名。

他的侄子哈里·F·古根海姆在宣布这一决定时表示，据当时的报道，受托人担心这​​些艺术品如果不被妥善保管，就会一直“藏在我们的金库里”。他补充道：“我们认为这些画作不应该落得如此下场。”

这是一种高尚的情怀，但事后看来，或许代价惨重。

同年晚些时候，这50幅画作在伦敦的一场拍卖会上以总成交价536,580英镑成交，当时约合150万美元。此后，其中许多画作以更高的价格再次出现在市场上。如今，其中一幅作品——《混凝土壁》（Betonte Ecken）——将重返拍卖市场。这幅画作于1964年被一位纽约艺术品经销商以22,000英镑（当时约合62,000美元，相当于今天的540,000美元）的价格拍得。此次估价为6000万至8000万美元。

“古根海姆博物馆当时的藏品真是琳琅满目，令人眼花缭乱，”佳士得拍卖行20世纪及21世纪艺术全球主席马克斯·卡特说道。佳士得正是本月拍卖会的举办方。他补充道，该基金会“出售了许多如今难以想象的杰作”。卡特当时正在纽约接受电话采访。

《混凝土壁龛》（Betonte Ecken）不仅有望打破康定斯基作品的拍卖纪录，而且几乎肯定会打破这一纪录。佳士得表示，一位担保人已确认，出价将超过2023年康定斯基画作《穆尔瑙教堂二号》（Murnau mit Kirche II）创下的3720万英镑（4455万美元）的纪录。

康定斯基作品价值的飙升，充分证明了他在当今艺术市场的地位。卡特表示，尽管在古根海姆拍卖会举办时（当时他已去世二十年），康定斯基的声誉早已确立，但当时的《混凝土壁》“仍然非常具有前瞻性”。他补充道：“如今它已成为经典之作”，并称这幅画是康定斯基的“代表作”。

“如果你走到街上，问最先听说过康定斯基的 10 个人闭上眼睛，描述一下他的一幅杰作是什么样子，那他们说的就是这幅画。”

康定斯基是 20 世纪 10 年代抽象艺术兴起的重要人物，他在 1922 年 12 月至 1923 年 1 月期间创作了《混凝土之巅》。这是这位艺术家职业生涯以及整个抽象艺术运动的关键时期，也正是这一时期诞生了他的一些最受欢迎的作品。

在故乡俄罗斯生活了七年后，康定斯基回到了第一次世界大战爆发前居住的德国。他的艺术与苏联新政权的反资产阶级意识形态日益冲突（他后来还被纳粹贴上了“堕落艺术家”的标签），因此他接受了魏玛著名的包豪斯学院的邀请，在那里教授理论。

《混凝土壁》创作于康定斯基抵达纽约后不久，是他高度理论化的造型和几何风格的典型代表。卡特说，这幅画的复杂性、色彩和构图都“综合了他之前的所有作品”。他还补充道：“对一些收藏家来说，这是他最伟大、最重要的时期。”

这幅画也体现了音乐在康定斯基作品中的重要影响。众所周知，1896年，他在莫斯科大剧院欣赏了一场瓦格纳音乐会后，便决定投身艺术事业。（他后来这样描述当时的感受：“我脑海中浮现出所有色彩，它们就呈现在我眼前。狂野的、近乎疯狂的线条在我眼前勾勒出来。”）卡特表示，除了黑色线条酷似乐谱之外，《混凝土之墙》在更深层次上也具有“交响乐”的特质。

Hugo Erfurth/Heritage Images/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

“当你站在这幅画前时，所有这些不同的形状和元素之间的关系——在水平低下的艺术家手中，它们可能会显得混乱、杂乱，甚至不连贯——却极其和谐，”他说道，并补充道：“这真的关乎各种形式之间的关系。”

这幅名为《强调的边角》（德语：Betonte Ecken）的画作尺寸超过4.25英尺（高）和4.25英尺（宽）的正方形画布，对于康定斯基的作品而言尺寸异常巨大。卡特表示，这幅作品的相对稀有性也影响了它的价值。

与同时代艺术家相比，康定斯基的创作量并不算特别多。虽然他的作品数量没有确切统计，但根据一份作品全集（一本收录艺术家已知作品的学术汇编）记载，他的油画作品不足1200幅。（相比之下，毕加索的一份作品全集就收录了超过16000幅绘画和素描作品。）其中许多作品现藏于一些机构，而这些机构如今绝不会考虑出售它们。

不过，其中也包括古根海姆博物馆，该馆此后又购入了新的康定斯基作品，目前拥有超过150件康定斯基的作品。虽然博物馆的资产负债表上可能因此损失了价值数百万美元的杰作，但它无疑保留了最具代表性的作品，包括著名的《构图八号》。正如这位伟大收藏家的侄子在1964年拍卖会前所说，基金会只拍卖了那些“在不损害博物馆永久收藏地位的前提下可以合理出售”的画作。