Kandinsky's "The Motley Life" Sells at London Auction for £27 Million
Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky's 1907 painting "Das bunte Leben" has sold at Christie's in London for £27 million. Nazi German forces seized the work from an Amsterdam museum during the war, and it was returned to the original owners' heirs in 2023.
A painting by Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky, "Das bunte Leben" ("The Motley Life"), has been sold at the Christie's auction house in London for £27 million, or roughly €32 million, according to the auction house. The work has a complicated past: it was confiscated during the Second World War and, after decades of effort, returned to the family that had once owned it.
Price and estimate
Before the sale, the auction house had valued the painting at between £18 million and £25 million, so the final price exceeded that range. Once taxes are included, the buyer will pay £31.56 million, the news agency DPA reported.
Shortly before the auction began, a Christie's representative described the piece as a revolutionary work that reflects the development of the artist's visual language and marks the striking transformation of his style in the following years.
The painting
Kandinsky created the work in Paris in 1907. It is regarded as one of the most important pieces of his early period and marks his shift toward abstraction.
Its path through war and after
In 1927, a couple named Lewenstein from Amsterdam bought the painting and later lent it to the Amsterdam City Museum. After the Netherlands was occupied, Nazi German forces removed the work from the museum and sold it at auction in October 1940.
In 1972, the bank Bayerische Landesbank acquired the painting and placed it with a Munich museum on a long-term lease. The Lewensteins' heirs spent decades trying to recover the family collection and filed a claim against the bank in 2017. In 2023, an independent commission dealing with the restitution of cultural property seized as a result of Nazi persecution recommended that the painting be returned to the collectors' heirs. This was done the same year.
