London had not had an October like it in years, though not every house shared in the success. The turnover at the Frieze Week evening sales across Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips rose 63.4 percent on last year to produce the strongest autumn marquee sales of the 2020s. However, it was Christie’s that accounted for nearly four in every five pounds of it, its largest share of the week this decade. On October 14, its two evening sales, built around the Peter Simon collection and a restituted Kandinsky, brought £218.6 million ($287.5 million). Sotheby’s took the rostrum on New Bond Street the following night and made less than a quarter of that amount.
Leading the way was Willem de Kooning’s Untitled (1977), which sold for £9.8 million ($12.9 million) (all prices include fees), the most ever paid for the artist at an auction in Europe. As top lots go, though, it was a modest one, and Kandinsky’s Das bunte Leben (1907) had fetched more than three times as much across town the evening before. Beyond the de Kooning, Sotheby’s relied on Richter, Rothko, and Hockney, while several younger names on the catalogue went home unsold.
Willem de Kooning, Untitled, 1977, oil on canvas, 136.8 x 151.7 cm (53⅞ x 59¾ in.). Image: Sotheby’s
Sotheby’s Contemporary Evening Auction on October 15, 2026, catalogued 37 lots with a presale estimate of £41.7 to 58.6 million ($55.2 to 77.7 million), and ultimately realized a total of £46.0 million ($61.0 million). Works by Damien Hirst, Anselm Kiefer, and Leon Kossoff were all withdrawn, and 28 of the remaining 34 sold for a sell-through rate of 82.4 percent. At hammer, the sale came to only £36.9 million ($48.9 million), below the low estimate even after trimming it to account for the withdrawals. Turnover slipped 3.3 percent from last October, when Sotheby’s made more from seven fewer lots, and the house now sits nearer its 2024 low of £37.6 million ($49.1 million) than the £85.7 million ($98.7 million) it realized in October 2022.
The de Kooning carried the night. Tom Eddison, co-head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s London, opened the guaranteed canvas at £7 million ($9.3 million) and brought the hammer down at £8.2 million ($10.9 million), a hair within its £8 to 12 million ($10.6 to 15.9 million) estimate. Art critic David Sylvester called 1977 the “annus mirabilis” of de Kooning’s career, and the painting’s sale coincided with the Rijksmuseum’s retrospective exhibition Willem de Kooning at work in Amsterdam. It sold for two and a half times what it made at Sotheby’s New York in 2015. Even so, it was the house’s lowest-priced Frieze Week top lot since 2023, when Francis Bacon’s Study for a Portrait (1979) sold for £4.3 million ($5.3 million).
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Georg Baselitz, P.D. Idol, 1964, oil on canvas, 100.8 x 81.4 cm (39⅝ x 32 in.). Image: Sotheby’s
