Mondriaan painting set to fetch €30m at auction later this year

A painting by the Dutch artist Piet Mondriaan is expected to sell for more than €30 million when it goes under the hammer later this year.

The work, Composition III, dates from 1920, the year Mondriaan returned to Paris to develop his distinctive abstract style of Neo-Plasticism.

The painting, which has been in a private collection for the last 25 years, is expected to fetch the highest price this autumn when London auction house Christie’s puts it up for sale on October 14.

“It is a very rare work from the year that you really see Mondriaan finding his feet and developing his neoplastic theory as an artist,” Keith Gill, head of impressionist and modern art at Christie’s said.

Mondriaan finished just eight paintings in 1920, five of which are owned by major museums such as the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Tate in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Christie’s estimates it will sell for between £20 mln and £20 mln (€23 mln-€35 mln), but Gill said that could prove to be a conservative estimate.

“Given the importance of this masterpiece and the outstanding condition it is in, it could easily fetch more,” he told the Telegraaf.

The record price for a Mondriaan was set in November 1922, when Composition no. II sold for $51 million (€49.4 mln) at Sotheby’s in New York.