Nazi looted painting returned to Jewish owners auctioned for more than £31 million
Sold this week after almost six minutes of bidding, the Kandinsky artwork was stolen by the Nazis in Amsterdam in 1940
A Nazi-looted painting by Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky which was restored to the descendants of its rightful Jewish owners in 2023 sold for more than £31.5 million at Christie’s on Wednesday, exceeding its estimated value and setting the night’s highest price.
Lot 115, the 1907 work Das bunte Leben (La vie mélangée or The Colourful Life), was one of 46 items in the auction house’s ’20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale’.
It sold after six minutes of bidding, although the buyer has not been identified.
Moscow-born abstract artist Kandinsky (1866-1944), co-founded the influential Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) art group and later taught at the famous Bauhaus school in Germany.
WASSILY KANDINSKY (1866-1944)
Das bunte Leben (La vie mélangée). Pic: Christie’s
The Colourful Life was bought by Amsterdam Jewish couple Hedwig and Emanuel Albert Lewenstein in November 1927, and was on loan to the city’s Stedelijk Museum from 1933.
The couple, who died before the second world war, left their extensive art collection to their two children.
The Times of Israel reports that the painting was auctioned off under “unclear circumstances” on October 9, 1940 — less than five months into Nazi Germany’s occupation of the Netherlands — to Salomon Slijper, a Dutch Jewish businessman who survived the war in hiding.
In 1972, the year after Slijper died, his widow Johanna sold the painting to Bayerische Landesbank, the state bank of Bavaria, for 900,000 Dutch guilders — equivalent to about £3.7 million today.
For the next fifty years, it was on loan to the Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and Kunstbau museum in Munich. The Lewensteins’ heirs filed a lawsuit in 2017, demanding that the painting be handed to them.
In 2023, an independent German commission determined that the Kandinsky painting “was seized as a result of persecution” of Jews under German occupation. It recommended the piece be restored to the Lewensteins’ heirs.
The bank implemented the recommendation in June that year, enabling the Lewenstein heirs to put the painting up for auction.
An estimated 650,000 total works of art and cultural treasures were looted from museums, churches, and private collection by the Nazis during World War II, representing roughly one-fifth of all artworks in Europe at the time.
In 2023, a painting by Kandinsky sold for roughly $45 million (£33.7 million) at Sotheby’s.