For a city that has spent several years being told it has lost ground to New York and Paris, London had a remarkably good week. On Wednesday 14 October, Christie's two evening sales of 20th- and 21st-century art made £218.6m, more than double the equivalent night a year earlier, according to Apollo. The London art auctions of Frieze Week were not uniformly strong, and the fair itself was described as patchy. But taken together, the week offers a clear picture of how the top of the art market is behaving in late 2026: generous for the very best works, cautious about almost everything else.

A record single-owner sale

The centrepiece was Monsoon: The Peter Simon Collection, the personal holdings of the founder of the British fashion retailer. Its evening sale of 41 lots made £107.5m, with just one lot unsold, landing within a pre-sale estimate of £78.7m to £115.1m, reported Il Sole 24 Ore. Christie's describes it as the highest-value single-owner collection it has ever sold in London. A day sale the following morning added £10.2m and was 97% sold by lot and by value, according to London Art Walk, with an online sale closing afterwards.

The top lot of the collection was Francis Bacon's Figure in Movement (1978), which sold for £17.2m against an estimate of £14m to £18m. Il Sole 24 Ore notes that it went to a bidder in the room after a single bid above the reserve, a reminder that a big number does not always mean a bidding war.

The more telling results sat further down the catalogue:

  • Liubov Popova's Painterly Architectonic (1918) made £7.6m, an auction record for the artist and roughly three times its high estimate.
  • Bridget Riley's Streak 2 (1979) set a record for the artist at £5.2m.
  • Hurvin Anderson's Last House (2013) made £5.7m, against an estimate of £2m to £3m.
  • David Bomberg's 1929 view of Toledo set a record for the artist at about £3.3m.

Il Sole 24 Ore observed that although the collection was built around post-war British painting, its strongest prices came from international and early 20th-century avant-garde works, which took four of the top six places.

The guarantee behind the headline

There is an important detail beneath the £107.5m. The collection was fully guaranteed before the sale, with Christie's covering a quarter of the exposure and third parties the remaining three-quarters, according to Il Sole 24 Ore. Guarantors ended up buying around a quarter of the lots, including four of the ten most expensive, and the paper suggests the arrangements may have saved as many as eight lots from going unsold.

That does not diminish the result, but it changes how to read it. Guarantees now do much of the work of reassuring consignors that a sale will happen at all. Where the market was less sure, prices settled at the bottom of the range: a second, earlier Bacon reached only its £4m low estimate, and Anderson's Hope Gardens (2005) went to its guarantor at the £1.2m low estimate.

Kandinsky, Mondrian and the mixed-owner sale

The various-owner evening sale that followed made just over £111m. Its top lot, and the most expensive work of the week, was Wassily Kandinsky's Das bunte Leben (1907) at £31.56m, against an estimate of £18m to £35m. Piet Mondrian's Composition III (1920) followed at £25.2m. Across both evening sales, 91% of lots found buyers and seven artist records fell, according to London Art Walk.

Apollo also picked out David Hockney's Stanley in Dog Painting 17 (1995), the first of the artist's dog paintings to come to auction, which sold for £3.5m against an estimate of £1.5m to £2.5m.

Sotheby's and Phillips: steadier, more selective

Sotheby's evening sale made £46m, reported Apollo. Its top lot was a 1977 untitled painting by Willem de Kooning at £9.8m, the highest price for the artist at auction in Europe. Michael Andrews's Butterfly Fish (1978) made £704,000 against an estimate of £80,000 to £120,000, a record for the artist. Sotheby's says its London sales have passed $1bn so far this year, its highest year-to-date total in the city since 2015, and it is moving its Modern British and Irish sales from November to October and March. That department's evening sale was led by Paul Henry's The Potato Harvest, which made £883,200.

At Phillips, the evening sale totalled £14.84m, with 20 of the 23 lots originally announced selling, according to London Art Walk. Its top lot, Gerhard Richter's Mathis (1983), made £5.84m, slightly under its £6m low estimate. Lower down, demand was livelier: Megan Rooney's Blue departure (2021) made £245,000 against an estimate of £50,000 to £70,000, said Apollo.

The market paid a premium for rarity and quality, and very little for anything else.

The fair told a quieter story

Frieze London and Frieze Masters, which ran alongside the sales, painted a more cautious picture. The Art Newspaper reported uneven trade, with collectors taking longer to commit than before the downturn and some dealers saying the bigger money was heading to Art Basel Paris, which runs from 23 to 25 October. One adviser summed up the mood: "It's the very high and the very low stuff that is selling the best."

The examples bear that out. Gagosian sold all six of its recent Albert Oehlen paintings, believed to be priced above $1m each, and Hauser & Wirth sold a Jan Brueghel the Elder still life at Frieze Masters for around £5m. At the other end, Harlesden High Street sold out its stand of Marcus Jefferson works priced from £2,000 to £8,000 by the end of the VIP day. The middle, where many established dealers operate, was harder going. Buyers from the Gulf and India were reported to be active.

What to watch

London's week matters beyond the totals. Apollo points out that the city has been compared unfavourably with New York and Paris since Brexit and the curtailment of non-dom status, yet it has now hosted Joe Lewis's collection at Sotheby's in June, at almost £250m, and the Simon collection in October. For wealthy collectors, and for the advisers and brands around them, a few things stand out:

  • Single-owner collections are the market's engine. Well-known names with long-held, fresh-to-market works are drawing the money and the publicity.
  • Guarantees shape outcomes. A strong total can rest partly on pre-arranged buyers, so sell-through and who bought matter as much as the headline.
  • Quality is priced, the middle is not. Records for Popova, Riley and Bomberg sat beside works that barely reached their low estimates.
  • Paris is next. Art Basel Paris this week will show whether the confidence seen in London's salerooms carries across the Channel.

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