A painting by Russian-French artist Wassily Kandinsky, looted by the Nazis in Amsterdam in 1940, has sold for £31.56 million (around €31.9 million) at auction in London. The sale follows a years-long campaign by the heirs of its original owners to recover the artwork.
Das bunte Leben (1907) was sold by the heirs of Amsterdam couple Emmanuel and Hedwig Lewenstein at Christie’s on Wednesday. The auction house had estimated the painting would fetch between £18 million and £25 million.
The Lewensteins bought the painting in 1927 to expand their art collection. After Emmanuel’s death in 1930, Hedwig lent it to Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum.
German forces seized the family’s art collection in October 1940, during the early months of the occupation of the Netherlands. The Kandinsky disappeared from the museum and was later sold at auction to collector Sal Slijper.
Slijper’s widow sold the painting to Bayerische Landesbank in 1972. It was subsequently displayed in a Munich museum for more than five decades.
The Lewensteins’ children, Robert and Wilhelmine, spent years seeking the return of their parents’ looted collection. In 2023, German courts ruled that Das bunte Leben had been looted, and the bank returned the painting to the heirs that year.
Christie’s described the work as one of Kandinsky’s early masterpieces, highlighting its vivid colours and energetic composition as a panoramic view of contrasting aspects of human experience.
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