After the Handover: A Restituted Kandinsky, a London Saleroom, and the Question Nobody Likes Asking

For fifty years, anyone who wandered into the Lenbachhaus in Munich could stand in front of Wassily Kandinsky’s Das bunte Leben for the price of a museum ticket. The painting — six feet across, crowded with riders and towers and figures lifted from Russian folk tradition — is the picture in which Kandinsky stops describing the world and starts inventing one. It is not a minor work. It is the hinge on which a career, and arguably a century of abstraction, swings.

In October it will hang on a wall in King Street, St James’s, for a few days of viewing before Christie’s sells it. The house’s Keith Gill has said publicly that he expects it to fetch more than thirty million dollars, which would make it one of the three most expensive Kandinskys ever sold at auction. After that, in all likelihood, it disappears.

How it got here

The route is grim and familiar. Emanuel and Hedwig Lewenstein, German-Jewish collectors living in Amsterdam, bought the painting in 1927. In 1933 the widowed Hedwig sent it to the Stedelijk Museum for safekeeping. Months after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, associates of a dealer with connections to Alois Miedl — the figure at the centre of Nazi art trafficking in the Low Countries — collected it. By October 1940 it was at auction. It passed through two further owners before the German bank Bayerische Landesbank bought it in 1972 and lent it, permanently, to the Lenbachhaus.

The family’s descendants began the recovery effort in 2016 and sued the bank the following year. The bank’s position was that the 1940 sale had been prompted by a family divorce rather than by persecution. A German advisory commission disagreed, recommending return in 2023, and the Lenbachhaus honoured it. That took roughly seven years of legal work, which by the standards of Nazi-era spoliation claims counts as brisk.

The awkward second act

Here is the part that tends to be skated over. Restitution campaigners, museums and journalists all treat the moment of return as the ending. The wrong is acknowledged, the object goes back, the story closes. But for most restituted works, the return is the beginning of a second journey, and that journey usually ends at auction.

This is not a criticism of the heirs, and it should not be read as one. The Lewenstein descendants are not a museum with a duty of public access. They are a dispersed group of people who were owed something taken by force from their family, and what they are owed is the object and everything the object represents, including its value. Selling is the only practical way to divide a single painting among many claimants. To suggest they should have donated it back to the institution that spent six years contesting their claim would be an extraordinary thing to ask.

But it does mean that the public consequence of a successful restitution is often a loss of public access. Das bunte Leben was visible in Munich. Murnau mit Kirche II, restituted under similar circumstances, sold at Sotheby’s London in 2023 for just under forty-five million dollars and remains the most expensive Kandinsky at auction. Both are now, or will shortly be, wherever thirty-to-forty-five-million-dollar pictures go — which is not usually a wall you can walk up to.

Why London, and why it matters here

The sale is happening in London, which is not incidental. Britain’s salerooms have long been the venue of choice for restituted European modernism, partly for tax reasons, partly because the expertise and the buyers cluster here. That gives the UK a peculiar position in this story: not the country that took the work, not the country that returned it, but the country where the market resolves what happens next.

It also sharpens a question that our own institutions are quietly grappling with. Arts Council England’s refreshed restitution guidance, published this year, encourages museums to be proactive about provenance rather than waiting for a claim to arrive. That is plainly right. But it also means more claims, more returns, and more works leaving public collections for private ones. Nobody has a satisfying answer to that, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.

What a fair ending might look like

There are partial solutions. Some institutions negotiate settlements in which they compensate heirs and retain the work, so that restitution and public access are not mutually exclusive. Others agree long-term loans after transfer of title. The Lenbachhaus, holding the world’s largest collection of Blue Rider material, might reasonably have explored either. It did not, or could not.

None of this should dampen the fact that a painting stolen under the Third Reich has been returned to the family it was taken from. That is justice, and it took a decade. But if you happen to be in St James’s in October, it is worth going to see it while you still can — because the honest description of what is about to happen is that a great picture is passing out of public view, and the reason is that we finally did the right thing.