A Kandinsky returned to the Lewenstein heirs

On 9 October 1940, five months after German troops entered the Netherlands, a large Kandinsky was offered at an Amsterdam auction as part of the estate of a person named only as “L.” Salomon Slijper bought it for 250 guilders. Earlier, on 5 September, an employee of the Stedelijk Museum had handed the painting, on instructions nobody has identified, to a messenger for the dealer Abraham Querido.

The painting is Das bunte Leben, tempera on canvas, about 130 by 163 centimetres, which Kandinsky painted in the spring of 1907. Emanuel Albert Lewenstein and his wife Hedwig Lewenstein-Weyermann, who lived in Amsterdam, bought it in November 1927 for 900 guilders. Emanuel died in 1930. From 1933 Hedwig lent the picture to the Stedelijk, and she died in 1937. Who inherited it, her son Robert, her daughter Wilhelmine or both, is not settled.

After the auction Slijper, who was himself persecuted as a Jew, gave the painting straight back to the Stedelijk, which listed it as a loan from “Mevr. Lewenstein.” In 1948 a relative asked the museum where it was. The Advisory Commission records that the museum said only that it had gone to Querido in 1940 at the owner’s request, with no mention of the auction. Slijper’s widow sold the painting in 1972 to Bayerische Landesbank, which has kept it on loan at the Lenbachhaus gallery in Munich.

The family’s heirs eventually made a claim, led by the heirs of Hedwig and of Irma Lewenstein Klein, who was married to Robert. The bank argued that Irma had put the painting up for sale herself during her divorce. The German Advisory Commission, a body that mediates over Nazi-era losses when both sides agree, looked at the case. In its recommendation of 16 May 2023 the commission, chaired by Hans-Jürgen Papier, said it could not establish who ordered the auction. It found many indications of a loss caused by persecution and did not accept the bank’s arguments. It recommended restitution. That is advice, not a court judgment.

The Art Newspaper and Christie’s report that the heirs secured the painting from the bank in June 2023. Christie’s offered it in its 20th/21st Century London Evening Sale on 14 October 2026, its first appearance on the market since then. A telephone bidder bought it. The Art Newspaper reports 27 million pounds at the hammer, or 31.6 million pounds with fees; Il Sole 24 Ore gives 31.5 million pounds including commissions. The buyer is not named in the sources we have seen, and we have not seen Christie’s own results page.