ARTnews has identified the seller behind the most expensive lot of Christie's November season in New York: the Nahmad family, the dealer dynasty, is consigning Wassily Kandinsky's Betonte Ecken, painted in 1922-23. The canvas goes on offer on 17 November carrying an estimate of $60 million to $80 million, the highest price tag in the house's November sales, backed by a third-party guarantee that, according to Christie's, ensures it will pass Kandinsky's auction record of $44.8 million, set by Murnau mit Kirche II at Sotheby's London in 2023.

The Nahmads are described as one of the art world's great collecting families, with holdings reputed to run to as many as 5,000 works worth upwards of $4 billion, and as the largest private collector of Picasso outside the Picasso family itself. Exhibition catalogues over the past quarter-century have named the Nahmad Collection as the painting's owner, including a 2005 show on Hilla Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim and a 2025 Museum Barberini survey of geometric abstraction.

The picture measures just over four feet square and was painted in Weimar, Germany, while Kandinsky was teaching at the Bauhaus. Its ownership trail runs from a 1926 Berlin auction, where it came from the Schwarz collection, through Galerie Nierendorf, which probably sold it in 1929 to Rebay, the adviser to Guggenheim and an early American champion of abstract art. Guggenheim later acquired it from Rebay, and the museum kept it until 1964, when it sold the work at Sotheby's London to dealer Stephen Hahn. Hahn later sold it to Boston collectors Sandra and David Bakalar, who offered it at Sotheby's in 1986, when it passed to its present owner.

Christie's declined to comment on the consignor's identity, and the Nahmads had not responded by the time of publication. The revelation turns the season's headline lot into a story about one of the market's most discreet dynasties quietly letting go of a museum-grade Kandinsky at a moment when the house is banking on it to set a new benchmark for the artist.