Christie’s London Offers a Restituted Kandinsky, Long Displayed in a German Museum, for $30 M.
Christie’s London will auction Wassily Kandinsky’s “Das bunte Leben (The Colorful Life)” (1907) on 14 October during Frieze week, with an estimate in excess of $30 million. The painting was restituted in 2023 to the heirs of Hedwig Lewenstein-Weyermann after a six-year legal battle over a work left behind by a Dutch family fleeing Nazi occupation and later displayed for decades in Germany. Emanuel Albert Lewenstein and Hedwig Lewenstein-Weyermann bought the painting in 1927; their children lent it to the Stedelijk Museum for safekeeping before fleeing, but the Nazis confiscated the family’s possessions in 1940 and the work later ended up with the Bavarian State Bank, which acquired it in 1972 and placed it on long-term loan to Munich’s Lenbachhaus in 1973, where it remained for more than five decades. Kandinsky’s auction record was set in 2023 when “Murnau mit Kirche II” (1910) sold at Sotheby’s London for £37.2 million (about $44.9 million), and that work was also Nazi-looted and later restituted.
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This story was covered in Museums in Meltdown, Billionaires in Control