Looted by Nazis and Recently Restituted, a Kaleidoscopic Kandinsky Painting Just Sold for Nearly $42 Million

A 1907 painting by Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky, titled *Das bunte Leben* ("The Colorful Life"), was stolen by the Nazis during World War II and spent half a century in a German museum before its restitution to its original owners’ heirs in 2023. The painting sold at auction for nearly $42 million, making it the most important early work by Kandinsky to ever come to auction. The sale followed a 2023 ruling that concluded the work was seized from its rightful Dutch Jewish owners, Soumya Sagar. The auction house did not disclose the buyer’s identity, per the New York Times’ Claire Moses. The painting, which measures over five feet wide, was completed during a stay in Paris with his partner, the German painter Gabriele Münter. It was influenced by both French Fauvism and traditional Russian folklore, and Kandinsky said he wanted to “let the viewer take a stroll within the picture” and “become absorbed” in it. The painting depicts an assortment of wanderers, monks and revelers, including an elderly traveler whose beard glows mint green and lovers embracing, oblivious to a distant funeral procession.

The painting was initially sold at auction in 1940 for 250 Dutch guilders, roughly 10 to 20 percent of its market value at the time. The family never authorized the transaction, nor did they receive any proceeds. The painting was eventually purchased in 1972 by the German bank Bayern LB and placed on long-term loan at the Lenbachhaus museum in Munich, where it hung for nearly fifty years. The Lewenstein descendants waged a decades-long campaign to recover the work, filing a lawsuit against the bank in 2017. The legal impasse finally broke in 2023, when Germany’s advisory commission on Nazi-looted art recommended that the painting should be returned to the family. The government panel affirmed that “there are numerous indications that this was a case of a seizure as a result of Nazi persecution,” according to the New York Times’ Catherine Hickley. The sale brought a triumphant close to a family’s multi-generational pursuit of justice. "The restitution of Das bunte Leben … represents an important moment in the painting’s history," Marc Porter, the chairman of Christie’s Americas, says in a statement. "Its return to the market marks the beginning of a new chapter for a work that holds such a significant place in modern art."

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