Sotheby’s made the just barely the fourth highest price for a work by Ben Nicholson tonight when it sold Oct 61 for $1.65m which follows the artist’s record set in Paris last September:

Tonight, at Sotheby’s London’s Modern & Post-War British Art Evening Sale, the largest work to come to auction by esteemed British artist Ben Nicholson, his critically-acclaimed Oct 61 (Mycenae-axe-blue),  just sold for £1,082,500 (est. £1-1.5 million). Appearing at auction this evening for the first time, the painting was previously a highlight of the Tate’s celebrated 1964 exhibition Painting & Sculpture of a Decade, 54-64.

Oct 61 (Mycenae-axe-blue) was first purchased in New York in 1966 by the American industrialist and social activist Joseph Irwin Miller. A philanthropist and patron, Miller gifted the work later that year to the Christian Theological Seminary, Indianapolis. Proceeds of the sale of the work will benefit CTS’s programmes relating to religion and the arts, which form part of the seminary’s distinctive and enduring mission.