A painting by the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky that was looted by the Nazis has sold at an auction for more than 31.5 million pounds (nearly $42 million). The work, “The Colorful Life,” spent decades in a German museum before it was returned to the family that owned it until 1940, opening the way for a private sale.
It sold after about six minutes of bidding on Wednesday in London, according to the auction house Christie’s, which had expected it to fetch between $24 million and $33 million. The buyer’s identity was not disclosed.
Experts consider the painting, from 1907, an important marker in Kandinsky’s journey from figurative painter to abstract artist. It depicts a vibrant, dreamlike scene that shows brightly dressed characters in a fantasy landscape. On its website, Christie’s described it as a panoramic landscape pulsing with life.
Before the hammer came down on Wednesday during Christie’s 20th- and 21st-century evening sale, the painting had taken a circuitous route to the auction block.
Before World War II, “The Colorful Life” was part of the collection of a Dutch Jewish industrialist who ran a sewing machine factory, Emanuel Lewenstein, and his wife, Hedwig Lewenstein Weyermann.
The Lewensteins’ art collection was sold at an auction in Amsterdam in October 1940, five months after Nazi-led Germany invaded the Netherlands. By then, the Lewensteins had died and their two surviving children had fled Europe. Historians have not been able to determine the exact circumstances of the 1940 sale.
The German bank Bayern LB bought the work in 1972 and lent it to a museum in Munich. That’s where it hung for about half a century until 2023, when the Lewensteins’ heirs filed a lawsuit to have the painting returned to them.
Bayern LB returned the painting to the heirs in 2023 after the German government’s advisory commission on Nazi-looted art recommended it do so.
The commission said at the time that, whether through sales or confiscation, art losses experienced by people from persecuted groups in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands should be assumed to have been involuntary unless there is clear evidence to the contrary.
“There are numerous indications that this was a case of a seizure as a result of Nazi persecution,” the commission said.
Wednesday’s sale did not exceed the highest price paid at auction for a Kandinsky. In 2023, a painting by the Russian artist sold for roughly $45 million at a Sotheby’s auction.
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