[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Wassily-Kandinsky-Das-bunte-Leben-1907.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tA 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\u2019s London on October 14, during Frieze week. Estimated in excess of $30 million, Das bunte Leben <\/em>(The Colorful Life<\/em>, 1907) was restituted to the heirs of Hedwig Lewenstein-Weyermann in 2023 after a six-year legal battle.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tMeasuring just over four feet high and five feet wide, it was Kandinsky\u2019s 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 <\/em>(1905\u201306) or Andr\u00e9 Derain with La Danse <\/em>(1906). Exhibited at the Salon d\u2019Automne 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cKandinsky\u2019s Das bunte Leben<\/em> is much more than an early masterpiece: it captures a moment when different influences were coming together in the artist\u2019s practice, and points towards the radical move into abstraction that would follow,\u201d said Marc Porter, the auction house\u2019s chairman for Americas, in press materials.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe Russian artist\u2019s auction record was established at Sotheby\u2019s London in 2023, when his Murnau mit Kirche II <\/em>(1910) fetched \u00a337.2 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tAmsterdam sewing machine magnate Emanuel Albert Lewenstein and his wife Hedwig Lewenstein-Weyermann bought The Colorful Life<\/em> in 1927. The collectors\u2019 children lent it to the Stedelijk Museum for safekeeping before fleeing the Netherlands ahead of the Nazi occupation. The Nazis confiscated the family\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tEmanuel and Hedwig\u2019s children, Robert and Wilhelmine Lewenstein, worked for decades to locate their parents\u2019 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<\/em>, \u201cEssentially, they told us to \u2018fuck off.\u2019\u201d But an independent German commission recommended in 2023 that the painting be restituted.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cKandinsky is no longer simply depicting the world around him, but beginning to imagine how painting might communicate something beyond the visible,\u201d said Keith Gill, vice chairman of the 20th- and 21st-century department, in a press release. \u201cColour assumes an unprecedented expressive intensity, while the figures and landscape become part of a larger vision of human experience.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/market\/christies-london-offers-restituted-kandinsky-german-museum-1234796483\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Wassily-Kandinsky-Das-bunte-Leben-1907.jpg?w=1024″] 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\u2019s London on October 14, during Frieze week. Estimated in excess of $30 million, Das bunte Leben (The Colorful Life, 1907) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2123491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2123491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2123491"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2123491\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2123491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2123491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2123491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}