Christie’s London Offers a Restituted Kandinsky, Long Displayed in a German Museum, for $30 M.

A Wassily Kandinsky painting left behind by a Dutch family fleeing the Nazi occupation and later on view for decades in a German museum will come to the auction block at Christie’s London on October 14, during Frieze week. Estimated in excess of $30 million, Das bunte Leben (The Colorful Life, 1907) was restituted to the heirs of Hedwig Lewenstein-Weyermann in 2023 after a six-year legal battle. 

Measuring just over four feet high and five feet wide, it was Kandinsky’s largest canvas up until that point. In it, he aimed to sum up the richness of life, as other artists had done, for example Henri Matisse with his painting Bonheur de vivre (1905–06) or André Derain with La Danse (1906). Exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in Paris the year it was created, the painting shows a pastoral landscape densely populated by pilgrims, peasants, saints, nobles, and mothers and children, many inspired by Russian legend, folklore, and religious traditions. 

“Kandinsky’s Das bunte Leben is much more than an early masterpiece: it captures a moment when different influences were coming together in the artist’s practice, and points towards the radical move into abstraction that would follow,” said Marc Porter, the auction house’s chairman for Americas, in press materials. 

The Russian artist’s auction record was established at Sotheby’s London in 2023, when his Murnau mit Kirche II (1910) fetched £37.2 million (then equivalent to $44.9 million). That painting, too, was stolen by the Nazis, was long on view in a museum, and had recently been restored to the rightful owners. 

Amsterdam sewing machine magnate Emanuel Albert Lewenstein and his wife Hedwig Lewenstein-Weyermann bought The Colorful Life in 1927. The collectors’ children lent it to the Stedelijk Museum for safekeeping before fleeing the Netherlands ahead of the Nazi occupation. The Nazis confiscated the family’s possessions and dispersed them in 1940, after which the work was sold at auction to collector Salomon B. Slijper. It was acquired by the Bavarian State Bank in 1972 and, the next year, placed on long-term loan to the Lenbachhaus in Munich, where it remained for more than five decades. 

Emanuel and Hedwig’s children, Robert and Wilhelmine Lewenstein, worked for decades to locate their parents’ collection. With the help of the Mondex Corporation, which specializes in the recovery of art and other assets looted during World War II, they sued for its return in a Manhattan court in 2017 (the company also does business in New York). When the Mondex Corporation approached the bank in 2016, founder James Palmer told Der Spiegel, “Essentially, they told us to ‘fuck off.’” But an independent German commission recommended in 2023 that the painting be restituted.

“Kandinsky is no longer simply depicting the world around him, but beginning to imagine how painting might communicate something beyond the visible,” said Keith Gill, vice chairman of the 20th- and 21st-century department, in a press release. “Colour assumes an unprecedented expressive intensity, while the figures and landscape become part of a larger vision of human experience.”