A Wassily Kandinsky painting stolen by the Nazis from a Jewish Holocaust victim has sold at auction for £37.2m.
Murnau mit Kirche II (Murnau with Church II) was sold by Sotheby’s in London on Wednesday (March 1) afternoon.
The painting belonged to the German Jewish art collectors Johanna Margarete Stern and Siegbert Samuel Stern. Johanna was captured by the Nazis in Amsterdam and died in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944.
The Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven returned the painting to Stern’s descendants last year after a legal dispute over its ownership.
Completed in 1910, the brightly colored landscape of a Bavarian village foreshadows the bold abstract imagery of Kandinsky’s later work.
The Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven returned the painting last year to the descendants of German-Jewish art collectors Johanna Margarete Stern and Siegbert Samuel Stern.
Siegbert Stern died in 1935 and Johanna left Nazi Germany for Amsterdam, where she was forced to sell much of her collection. He was arrested after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands and died in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944.
Sotheby’s said the proceeds from the sale will be divided among 13 surviving Stern heirs and will also fund further research into the fate of the family’s collection.
In 2013, Dutch museums identified 139 works of art as Nazi loot, including paintings by artists such as Kandinsky, Henri Matisse and Paul Klee.
In 2021, the municipality of Amsterdam agreed to return another Kandinsky work, Painting with houses, to the heirs of the Jewish family that originally owned it. The city bought it at auction in 1940 and hung it in the Stedelijk Museum.
Lucian Simmons, Sotheby’s global head of restoration, noted that this year marks the 25th anniversary of a 1998 international conference on looted art in Washington that found previous efforts to return looted art did not go far enough.
“Since then, Sotheby’s restoration department has worked with many heirs and families to reunite them with their stolen property while helping them retell their stories and celebrate their lives,” said Simmons.
Another restored work, Edvard Munch’s “Dance on the Beach,” sold at the same Sotheby’s auction for 16.9 million pounds ($20.5).
The huge painting, one of many designed for theater impresario Max Reinhardt, was bought in the 1930s by Norwegian shipowner Thomas Olsen after its Jewish owner, Curt Glaser, was forced to flee Nazi Germany.
Olsen hid Munch’s large collection of works — including a version of his most famous painting, The cry – during the Nazi occupation of Norway in World War II.
Sotheby’s said the painting had been sold “subject to agreement” between the Olsen and Glaser families.
This article includes AP reports