by A Wassily Kandinsky painting stolen by the Nazis from a Jewish Holocaust victim has fetched a record £37.2million at auction.
Murnau with Church II (Murnau with Church II) was sold by Sotheby’s in London on Wednesday evening (March 1).
The painting was owned by the German-Jewish art collectors Johanna Margarete Stern and Siegbert Samuel Stern. Johanna was arrested by the Nazis in Amsterdam and died in 1944 in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
The Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven returned the painting to Stern’s descendants last year after a legal battle over its ownership.
The colorful landscape of a Bavarian village, completed in 1910, foreshadows the bold abstract imagery of Kandinsky’s later work.
The Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven returned the painting to the descendants of German-Jewish art collectors Johanna Margarete Stern and Siegbert Samuel Stern last year.
Siegbert Stern died in 1935 and Johanna fled Nazi Germany to Amsterdam, where she was forced to sell much of her collection. She was arrested after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands and died in 1944 in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
According to Sotheby’s, proceeds from the sale will be split between 13 surviving Stern heirs and will also fund further research into the fate of the family collection.
In 2013, Dutch museums identified 139 works of art as Nazi-looted, including paintings by masters 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 it hung in the Stedelijk Museum.
Lucian Simmons, Sotheby’s global head of restitution, noted that this year marks the 25th anniversary of an international conference on looted art held in Washington in 1998, which found that previous attempts to return looted art had not gone far enough.
“Since then, Sotheby’s Restitution department has worked with many heirs and families to reunite them with their stolen property while helping to retell their stories and celebrate their lives,” Simmons said.
Another restituted work, Edvard Munch’s Dance on the Beach sold for £16.9 million ($20.5) at the same Sotheby’s sale.
The huge painting, one of several designed for theater impresario Max Reinhardt, was purchased by Norwegian shipowner Thomas Olsen in the 1930s after its Jewish owner, Curt Glaser, was forced to flee Nazi Germany.
Olsen hid his large collection of Munch works – including a version of his most famous painting, The Scream – during the Nazi occupation of Norway during World War II.
Sotheby’s said the painting was sold “subject to an agreement” between the Olsen and Glaser families.
This article contains AP reports
