Christie's has positioned its 14 October London evening sale, staged during Frieze Week, as one of the most consequential modern-art auctions in Europe this year. The headline lot is Piet Mondrian's Composition III, painted in 1920 and making its auction debut after a quarter of a century out of public view. It carries an estimate of £20 million to £30 million, the highest estimate placed on a Mondrian in Europe since 2009. The painting dates from the pivotal year in which Mondrian consolidated the principles of Neo-Plasticism, stripping form back to geometric abstraction. He completed only eight major paintings in 1920, and five are now held by museums including Tate in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, leaving a small number in private hands. The work was previously owned by the modernist architect and collector Armand P. Bartos and his wife Celeste. Its current auction record stands at $51 million, set by Composition No. II at Sotheby's in 2022. Sharing the sale is Wassily Kandinsky's Das bunte Leben (The Colorful Life) of 1907, a dense, large-scale canvas painted during the artist's Paris year that marks his turn toward abstraction. The painting was restituted in 2023 to the heirs of the German-Jewish collector Hedwig Lewenstein-Weyermann after a six-year legal battle, having spent more than five decades on view at Munich's Lenbachhaus. Christie's expects it to exceed $30 million, which would place it among the three most expensive Kandinskys ever sold; the artist's record is the £37.2 million paid for Murnau mit Kirche II at Sotheby's London in 2023. The sale's supporting lots include a marble torso of a Roman emperor and an Augustan marble portrait head of a girl, underlining Christie's strategy of pairing trophy modernism with classical material in its October Frieze Week programming.