Nazi-looted Kandinsky sells for £27 million at London auction

Wassily Kandinsky's painting "Colorful Life" sold for £27 million ($35.6 million) at auction by Christie's of London on Wednesday evening, the company said.

The famous painting had hung for decades in Munich's Lenbachhaus museum. It was classified as Nazi-looted art in 2023 and returned to the heirs of the Jewish collector family Lewenstein.

Keith Gill of Christie's 20th and 21st century art department said when the auction was announced that "Colorful Life" was a seminal work that captures the development of the artist's formal language and anticipates the extraordinary change in his style in the years that followed.

Gill also said it was deeply connected to the cultural traditions of Kandinsky's homeland, Russia.

Fairytale with Old Russian motifs

"Colorful Life," with Old Russian motifs and fairytale figures, was painted by Kandinsky (1866-1944) during his time in Paris, under the influence of styles such as Fauvism, Symbolism and Art Nouveau. 

According to Christie's, it was also exhibited at the Paris Salon d'Automne (Autumn Salon) in 1907. To this day it is regarded as a key work in Kandinsky's oeuvre.

In 1927, the Amsterdam collector couple Lewenstein acquired the painting. After the death of her husband, Emanuel Albert Lewenstein (1870-1930), his widow Hedwig Lewenstein-Weyermann (1875-1937) lent the tempera painting to the Stedelijk Museum as a permanent loan. 

After German forces occupied the Netherlands, the work was auctioned in October 1940. According to Christie's, the collector Salomon B Slijper won the bid. His family sold it in 1972 to the Bavarian State Bank (Bayern LB), which handed it over to the Lenbachhaus as a permanent loan in 1973.

Years-long fight over restitution

What followed was a years-long battle by the Lewenstein heirs. They regarded the October 1940 auction as an injustice and demanded restitution. Their argument was that the family had placed the painting with a museum in Amsterdam for safekeeping in 1938, before fleeing to the United States from the Nazis. It was then sold without permission.

Provenance research ultimately sided with the family. There was a lack of evidence that they had handed the painting over to the auction house in 1940 of their own free will, the Advisory Commission on Nazi-looted art found. The commission gave recommendations in Germany on disputed cases until 2025.

Sale 'on unknown instructions'

According to the commission's research, a museum employee had a messenger take the painting to the auction house in September 1940, "on unknown instructions," and offered it there. Numerous indications suggested that the painting had been taken in connection with the Nazis' systematic persecution of the Jewish population, the commission said.

The Bavarian State Parliament also approved the painting's return in 2023.