Christie's opened its Frieze Week auctions in London on 14 October 2026 with a double-header evening that more than doubled last year's comparable total. The night began with Monsoon: The Peter Simon Collection Evening Sale, devoted to the personal holdings of the Monsoon and Accessorize founder, followed by the multi-owner 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale. Together the two sales totalled £218,603,400 ($289.4 million), a rise of 103 per cent on the previous year. Auctioneers Adrien Meyer and Yü-Ge Wang fielded bids across 87 lots, achieving sell-through rates of 91 per cent by lot and 96 per cent by value. Buyers were led by Europe, the Middle East and Africa at 59 per cent, with 31 per cent from the Americas and 10 per cent from Asia-Pacific. The evening's top lot was Wassily Kandinsky's Das bunte Leben (1907), which sold for £31,560,000, above its estimate, making it the most valuable lot of the London October season in five years. The densely worked early painting, a panoramic scene blending Russian folk imagery with avant-garde colour, reached Christie's only after a long Nazi-era restitution dispute: the German state returned it in 2023 to the heirs of the German-Jewish collector Hedwig Lewenstein-Weyermann. Its result underlines how provenance resolution can unlock major consignments in a selective market. The Peter Simon collection itself made £107.5 million, the highest value ever achieved by a single-owner collection at Christie's in London, with world auction records set for seven artists, four of them women. Piet Mondrian's Composition III (1920), a breakthrough Neo-Plasticist canvas, was offered at auction for the first time. The contemporary section included David Hockney's painting of his dachshund Stanley — rendered more poignant by the artist's death this summer — alongside works by Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly and Gerhard Richter.