A Kandinsky taken from Warsaw, offered in Berlin

On 14 June 1984 a small watercolour by Wassily Kandinsky vanished from the National Museum in Warsaw. It hung in the exhibition “Concepts of Space in Contemporary Art”. The museum told Rzeczpospolita, a Polish daily, that the theft happened between 12:30 and 13:00, while the gallery attendants were changing shifts. Two thin metal wires that held the sheet had been cut. No source consulted names the thief.

The sheet is small: 12.3 by 9.0 centimetres, in watercolour and pen and ink on light cardboard. A pencil dedication reads “To my dear Otto Ralfs”, dated 1 April 1928. Ralfs was a collector in Braunschweig. The Financial Times reports that Kandinsky made it in Dessau as a birthday gift. The Warsaw museum’s stamp is on the back.

The years between 1928 and 1984 are only partly clear. The auction catalogue of 2022 lists Ralfs as owner until 1940, then the Warsaw museum, and leaves 1940 to 1965 unexplained. The Financial Times alone adds that the Ralfs collection was stored in a depot in occupied Poland and that its contents vanished after the war. That claim has not been checked against an archive. The museum says it bought the sheet in 1982 from Desa, a state gallery. The catalogue gives the museum’s ownership as about 1965 to 1983.

After the theft the sheet resurfaced quickly. ICOM Germany and ICOM Poland, two museum bodies, say it was sold at Sotheby’s in London on 5 December 1984 and then went to a private collection in the United States. The auction house Grisebach says only “the first half of the 1980s”. The International Foundation for Art Research, a New York body, published the theft in 1985. According to Monopol, the work was entered in Interpol’s database of stolen works only shortly before the 2022 sale. The Art Newspaper, citing Grisebach’s catalogue, reports that Galerie Thomas in Munich sold it in 1988 to Inge Maren Otto, a Hamburg philanthropist.

Otto consigned it to Grisebach in Berlin as lot 31, for the sale of 1 December 2022, with an estimate of 100,000 to 150,000 euros. About a week earlier, Poland’s culture ministry found the lot and asked Grisebach to withdraw it. On the day, the Polish consul in Berlin, Marcin Krol, handed over a written statement that the work was stolen. Grisebach did not withdraw it. It said its legal check found no objection and that the consignor bought in good faith in 1988. Poland replied that a sale after the theft cannot be in good faith, because of the museum stamp.

The hammer price was 310,000 euros. Reports give 387,500 euros including fees. UPI, citing the Grisebach listing, gives 408,328 dollars. The next day Grisebach suspended the handling of the sale and said it would seek a court review. In November 2023 the Financial Times reported that the buyer had withdrawn and that no court hearing was registered.

A Warsaw prosecutor opened a case in early 2023. It was suspended on 12 September 2024 while Germany was asked for its file, which arrived on 3 January 2025. Otto has not been charged. Polish prosecutors still wanted to question her as a witness. On 13 January 2025 Rzeczpospolita quoted the prosecutor’s spokesman, Piotr Skiba. He said Grisebach cancelled the sale after the ministry’s action and returned the work to the consignor. This rests on one outlet. No court ruling is reported, and the sheet has not returned to Warsaw. The latest dated report, Rzeczpospolita on 4 June 2025, mentions in passing that the matter of its return to the museum is still with the prosecutor.