Christie’s Takes $289 Million in London, Sotheby’s Stalls and Banksy’s Brexit Rat Sells at Phillips

London’s Frieze-week auctions produced three very different nights. Christie’s took £218.6 million ($289.4 million) across two evening sales on Wednesday (Oct. 14), more than double last year’s total, ARTnews reports. Sotheby’s followed on Thursday with £45.9 million ($61 million), a touch under last October’s £47.6 million. Phillips sold all 20 lots of its evening sale for £14.8 million ($19.6 million).

Wassily Kandinsky’s Das bunte Leben (1907) led Christie’s at £31.6 million ($41.8 million). The auctioneer Adrien Meyer called it “the most important early work by the artist to ever come to auction.” The painting was restituted in 2023 to the heirs of Hedwig Lewenstein-Weyermann, ARTnews notes.

Read moreKarl-Anthony Towns and Jordyn Woods’s Curated Sotheby’s Sale Just Set a Record

The bigger draw, insiders told ARTnews, was “Monsoon,” the collection of Peter Simon, founder of the British retailer Monsoon. It made £107.5 million ($142.3 million), the highest total for a single-owner collection in Christie’s London history, and 40 of its 41 lots found buyers. Records fell for Liubov Popova, whose Painterly Architectonic made £7.64 million, more than three times its high estimate, and for Bridget Riley, David Bomberg, Portia Zvavahera and Barbara Hepworth. The adviser Philip Hoffman urged caution, since 29 of the 41 lots carried third-party guarantees.

These auctions are staged, managed, and already pumped up to the max for the best guarantees they can get.

Philip Hoffman, chairman and founder of the Fine Art Group, ARTnews

Sotheby’s was quieter. An alarm interrupted the start, and the auctioneer Tom Eddison told the room, “Don’t panic, it’s okay.” The sale itself was harder to shrug off: of 34 lots offered after three withdrawals, six went unsold, and the total hammered at £36.9 million, below the £39.5 million low estimate, The Art Newspaper reports. Willem de Kooning’s untitled 1977 canvas topped it at £9.8 million ($12.9 million), a record for the artist at a European auction, and a David Hockney iPad drawing made £1.9 million, a record for one of his iPad works. A Yayoi Kusama hammered at £250,000, a quarter of its low estimate.

“Collectors are not willing to take big risks,” said Thomas Stauffer, president of the Swiss Art Market Association. Sotheby’s can still point to a strong year: it says the night lifted its London modern and contemporary total for 2026 to £598 million, the highest at this point in the year since 2015, and Karl-Anthony Towns and Jordyn Woods’s curated sale set a series record in New York on Oct. 7.

At Phillips, Banksy’s Keep Ou T sold at auction for the first time for £1.61 million ($2.1 million), inside its £1.2 million to £1.8 million estimate, per Phillips’ results. Banksy made it in 2019 in response to the Brexit vote and showed it that summer at the Royal Academy: a stencilled rat wields the T missing from “KEEP OU” on shutters beneath a “Customs: Arrivals from the EU” sign, according to Phillips. Gerhard Richter’s Mathis (1983) led the evening at £5.84 million ($7.6 million), under its £6 million to £8 million estimate, and Eva Helene Pade and Joseph Yaeger set records. Banksy’s year has been busier on walls than in salerooms, from a Lucas Museum commission to a U.K. cleanup bill.

The real test comes next. Christie’s New York sales start Nov. 17, and Hoffman says he is waiting on the Antonio Homem Sonnabend collection, estimated at more than $50 million and offered without guarantees, for a clearer reading of the market.