On the evening of 12 May 2025, Christie’s New York saleroom became the stage for a transaction that was as much about art history as it was about market mechanics. Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue (1922) achieved $47.6 million, including buyer’s fees, reaffirming the enduring power of De Stijl abstraction in a market increasingly defined by caution and selectivity. The painting, a quintessential example of Mondrian’s pursuit of universal harmony through pure form, had once hung in the vestibule of the Park Avenue apartment of Leonard and Louise Riggio – its sale marking the centrepiece of the most anticipated collection dispersal of the season.
The Evening’s Choreography: Guarantees, Bids, and a Single Bidder
The auction was conducted in two segments. The first encompassed 39 works from the Riggio collection – the late Leonard Riggio, founder of Barnes & Noble and longtime chairman of the Dia Art Foundation, had died the previous year at 83, leaving behind a formidable art trove. The second segment, conducted later in the evening, featured twentieth-century art. Together, the two sales totalled $489 million, surpassing the $413.3 million achieved at the equivalent event in May 2024.
But it was the Mondrian that commanded the room’s attention. Estimated in the region of $40 million to $50 million, the painting hammered at $41 million, securing $47.56 million with fees. While this figure fell slightly short of the artist’s previous record of $51 million set at Sotheby’s in 2022 for Composition No. II (1930), its performance was a powerful affirmation of Mondrian’s market strength. The work was guaranteed by a third party, meaning it was certain to sell, and it attracted only one bidder – presumably the guarantor – who was on the phone with Alex Rotter, Christie’s newly named global president. There was no action in the room.
The absence of competitive bidding did not diminish the painting’s significance. Vanessa Fusco, head of Impressionist and modern art at Christie’s, described the work as embodying Mondrian’s vision of “purely plastic beauty, that is, beauty expressed exclusively through lines, planes or volumes and through colour – a beauty without natural form and without representation.” The sale confirmed the enduring appeal of an aesthetic that, a century after its creation, continues to command extraordinary prices.
Art dealer Brett Gorvy, formerly of Christie’s, offered a candid assessment: “Overpricing at the start was a deterrent with many collectors, despite the quality and rarity of the work.” His observation highlights a tension at the heart of the high-end art market: the need to set estimates high enough to reflect a work’s significance, while avoiding estimates so ambitious that they deter competitive bidding. The guarantee structure ensured a result, but the single-bid outcome suggested the market’s appetite for risk had its limits.
A Canvas No Bigger Than a Throw Pillow
Measuring just 21¼ × 21 inches – roughly the size of a throw pillow, as the New York Times somewhat cruelly noted – Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue is a work of deceptive simplicity. Its large red plane dominates the canvas, balanced by smaller areas of yellow, blue, and grey, all contained within a grid of black lines. The composition appears stable, even static, but closer inspection reveals subtle tensions: the slight asymmetry of the grid, the varying densities of colour, the way the eye moves across the surface.
These qualities – balance, tension, harmony – are central to Mondrian’s aesthetic. He believed that art could achieve a universal beauty by reducing form to its essential elements, stripping away representation and narrative in favour of pure abstraction. The result, in this painting, is a work that feels simultaneously monumental and intimate, rigorous and sensual. It is a painting that rewards sustained attention, revealing new relationships and harmonies with each viewing.
The work’s provenance is itself a story of modernist networks. It was acquired directly from the artist in 1922 by Antony Kok, a poet and close associate of Mondrian who was instrumental in the early days of the De Stijl movement. It later passed through Nelly van Doesburg – wife of Theo van Doesburg, Mondrian’s great collaborator and rival – before entering various private collections. It was acquired by Leonard Riggio on 1 March 2000 through Blains Fine Art in London, and had remained in the Riggio collection for a quarter of a century. The painting had previously sold at Christie’s New York in May 1992 for $2.58 million – approximately $5.91 million adjusted for inflation – making its journey to $47.6 million a remarkable trajectory of escalating value.
Mondrian’s Market: Three Decades of Escalating Value
The painting’s journey from $2.58 million to $47.6 million mirrors the broader trajectory of Mondrian’s market over the past three decades. In 2015, Composition No. III, with Red, Blue, Yellow, and Black (1929) fetched $50.6 million at Christie’s – approximately $68 million adjusted for inflation. The 2022 sale of Composition No. II for $51 million set the nominal record. And while the 2025 result did not surpass that benchmark, it consolidated Mondrian’s position as one of the most consistently valuable artists in the modern market.
The market for Mondrian’s work reflects his enduring appeal. While his prices have not reached the stratospheric levels commanded by Picasso or Warhol, they have remained consistently strong, driven by a combination of scarcity, quality, and the artist’s foundational importance to twentieth-century art. The 2025 sale reinforced this dynamic: even in a market characterised by caution and selectivity, a Mondrian of exceptional quality and provenance can command extraordinary prices.
The broader context matters. According to the Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report 2025, global art market sales reached an estimated $57.5 billion in 2024, but public auction values fell 20 percent year over year. In this climate, auction houses have become increasingly reliant on guarantees and irrevocable bids to instil confidence among consignors and buyers alike. The Mondrian sale, with its third-party guarantee and single bidder, exemplified this new architecture of risk management.
The Riggio Collection: A Legacy of Curated Modernism
The Riggio collection sale itself was a landmark event. Comprising 39 works focused on Surrealism, modernism, and Minimalism, it was the largest single collection of the season. Highlights included René Magritte’s L’empire des lumières (1949), which sold for $35 million, and Pablo Picasso’s Femme à la coiffe d’Arlésienne sur fond vert (Lee Miller) (1937), which achieved $28.01 million. The total for the Riggio collection was $272 million, though, without fees, the sale fell short of Christie’s $252 million estimate.
Leonard Riggio’s collecting philosophy was distinctive. He began acquiring art seriously in the 1990s with his wife Louise, after encountering Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses at Dia Chelsea – an experience that sparked his passion for large-scale, minimalist works. “I like to buy art by feel more than by sight, and these artists feel a certain way to me,” Riggio told ARTnews in 2016. The dispersal of the collection marked the end of an era for New York’s collecting community, where the Riggios had been fixtures on ARTnews‘ Top 200 Collectors list every year since 1999.
Christie’s approach to the collection was typical of the current market strategy. The house offered an undisclosed guarantee to win the collection and sold off about two-thirds of the lots to investors through irrevocable bids, offsetting its risk. The Mondrian had been guaranteed by a third party, meaning it was certain to sell regardless of bidding activity. This structural support helped ensure a result that, while below the painting’s estimated value, was nonetheless impressive given the broader market conditions.
Neo-Plasticism: The Philosophy That Made a Grid Priceless
To understand why a canvas of primary colours and black lines commands $47.6 million, one must understand the philosophy behind it. Mondrian’s art was rooted in the mystical ideas of Theosophy. Influenced by his contact with Analytical Cubism in Paris before 1914, Mondrian thought that Cubism had fallen short of its goal by not having developed toward pure abstraction. In his search for an art of clarity and order, Mondrian eliminated all representational components, reducing painting to its elements: straight lines, plane surfaces, rectangles, and the primary colours (red, yellow, and blue) combined with neutrals (black, grey, and white).
The term “Neoplasticism” – Nieuwe Beelding in Dutch – was first proposed by Mondrian in 1917 and initially employed by the De Stijl art movement. The theologian and mathematician M. H. J. Schoenmaekers provided both the spiritual inspiration and the mathematical formula for the new style, which was limited to the three primary colours, the three primary values, and the two primary directions: horizontal and vertical. As Mondrian wrote in Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art: “This new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and colour. On the contrary, it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and colour, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour.”
The movement’s influence has been vast. De Stijl shaped architecture, graphic design, and fashion; its ideas about harmony and balance have informed everything from urban planning to typography. The Bauhaus, which flourished in the years after Mondrian developed Neo-Plasticism, drew heavily on his ideas, and his impact can be seen in the work of artists as diverse as Josef Albers, Ellsworth Kelly, and Donald Judd. In the market, Mondrian’s legacy is secure. His works are held in the collections of the world’s great museums – the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam – and they continue to command attention at auction.
The fact that such a work can command $47.6 million at auction is, in one sense, extraordinary. In another, it is entirely logical. Mondrian’s grid paintings are not merely decorative objects; they are milestones in the history of art, representing a radical reimagining of what painting could be. To own one is to possess a piece of that history – to live with a work that changed the way we see. The painting now enters a new chapter of its history, passing from the Riggio collection to an as-yet-unnamed owner. Wherever it goes, it will carry with it the weight of a century’s worth of aesthetic innovation and the resonance of a vision that sought, through lines and planes and colour, to capture something universal.
