Wassily Kandinsky, Betonte Ecken (1922-23).Christie's

Art Dealer Family the Nahmads Are the Consignors Behind $80 M. Kandinsky Set to Break a Record at Christie’s

by · ARTnews

With the major fall auctions right around the corner, ARTnews can reveal that the consignor of Betonte Ecken (1922–23), the Wassily Kandinsky painting set to achieve upwards of $60M at Christie’s New York on November 17, is the Nahmad family.

The Nahmads are a prominent dynasty of dealers and collectors whose holdings are reputed to include as many as 5,000 artworks worth upwards of $4 billion. The family is also known to be the largest private collector of works by Pablo Picasso outside the Picasso family itself.

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Several exhibition catalogs from the past 25 years have listed the Nahmad Collection as the owner of Betonte Ecken. Among them are Art of Tomorrow: Hilla Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim (2005) and Geometric Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Kandinsky’s Universe (2025), produced by the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany.

With an estimate of $60 million to $80 million, the Kandinsky is the highest-priced lot in Christie’s November sales. The work carries a third party guarantee that, according to the auction house, ensures that it will break the artist’s auction record of $44.8 million, set by Murnau mit Kirche II (Murnau with Church II, 1910) at Sotheby’s London in 2023.

The colorful abstraction measures just over four feet square. Kandinsky painted it in Weimar, Germany, while he was teaching at the legendary Bauhaus.

As ARTnews’s Brian Boucher reported last week:

The painting has changed hands a number of times. Christie’s provenance shows it first coming to auction at the Jacob Hecht Auction House in Berlin in 1926, from the Schwarz collection, going to that city’s Galerie Nierendorf, which then sold it, probably in 1929, to Hilla Rebay—adviser to museum founder Solomon R. Guggenheim, an early supporter of abstract art in the US. Guggenheim later acquired it from Rebay, and it remained in the museum’s collection until 1964, when the museum sold it at Sotheby’s London to New York art dealer Stephen Hahn. At some point, Hahn sold it to Boston collectors Sandra and David Bakalar, who put it up for auction at Sotheby’s in 1986, when it went to the present owner.

That present owner, it seems, is the Nahmad family. Christie’s declined a request to comment. The Nahmads did not respond by press time.