Nazi-looted Kandinsky returned to Amsterdam family's heirs sells for £31.56 million

When Emanuel and Hedwig Lewenstein bought Wassily Kandinsky’s Das bunte Leben in 1927, they added a Paris painting from 1907 to the collection of two Amsterdam collectors who ran a sewing machine factory on the Dam. Emanuel died in 1930.

Hedwig then loaned the work to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam for safekeeping. A decade later, during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, the painting was swept into the seizure of the Lewenstein collection.

On 15 October 2026, the painting returned to the market at Christie’s in London, where it sold for £31.56 million, approximately €32 million or $42 million with fees. The price was well above Christie’s pre-sale estimate of £18–25 million.

Das bunte Leben was the most expensive lot of the evening. Marija Los, who heads client advisory for the Americas at Christie’s, placed the winning bid for an unnamed buyer.

The painting’s path to that sale was shaped by a long restitution effort. In October 1940, a museum employee acting for an unknown person arranged for the Kandinsky to be taken by courier to an auction house after the Lewenstein collection was seized.

Salomon B. Slijper, a Jewish collector, bought Das bunte Leben at auction shortly after the German occupation began.

Slijper’s family sold the work to the Bayerische Landesbank in 1972. The bank placed it on permanent loan to the Lenbachhaus museum in Munich, where it remained on display for more than fifty years.

For years after the Second World War, the Lewensteins’ children, Robert and Wilhelmine, sought to recover their parents’ looted collection.

The family’s heirs filed suit against the Bayerische Landesbank in 2017 to reclaim Das bunte Leben. German courts ruled in 2023 that the painting was looted art, and the bank returned it to the heirs after the German public prosecution department also classified it as looted art.

The 2026 sale followed another major transaction by the heirs. In 2023, they sold Bild mit Häusern, another looted Kandinsky, for more than €60 million.