A 1907 painting by Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky looted by the Nazis sold for nearly $42 million at a Christie’s auction in London this week.
Bidding for the painting “The Colorful Life,” which was signed by Kandinsky, lasted about six minutes. Christie’s expected the work to sell for between $24 million and $33 million.
Before World War II, “The Colorful Life” belonged to Emanuel Lewenstein, a Dutch Jewish industrialist, and his wife, Hedwig, who loaned it to the Stedelijk Museum in 1933.
People were interested in these podcasts
Their art collection was sold at auction in Amsterdam in October 1940, five months after Germany invaded the Netherlands. The circumstances of the auction are not clear, but the painting was bought by Salomon Slijper, a Dutch Jewish businessman who survived the war in hiding.
By then, the Lewensteins had died and their children had fled Europe.
Slijper’s widow sold the painting in 1972 to German bank Bayern LB, which lent it to a Munich museum, where it hung until 2023, when the Lewensteins’ heirs filed a lawsuit to get the painting returned.
Bayern LB returned the work to the heirs in 2023 after a German government advisory commission recommended it, saying there were numerous indications the painting was seized by the Nazis.
The Nazi regime seized more than 600,000 works of art from Jewish families, collectors and museums across Europe before and during WWII.
The Christie’s sale price did not top the auction record for a Kandinsky, roughly $45 million, set at Sotheby’s in 2023.
Contact the author
Please read our comment policy before commenting.