Colorful Grid Painting by Piet Mondrian Fetches $47.6 Million at Auction

Colorful Grid Painting by Piet Mondrian Fetches $47.6 Million at Auction

While it went for well below the auction house's estimate, "Composition With Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue" is now the Dutch artist's third highest-selling work

A picture by Piet Mondrian that belonged to the late founder of the Barnes & Noble bookstores, Leonard Riggio, raised 47.5 million dollars this Monday at an art auction at Christie’s in New York. Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue was one of the highlights of the night, but it was sold below the minimum fork, just like a picture of Claude Monet’s flowers from his Peupliers series, for almost 43 million. Other o…