This sale is part of a series of auctions in London devoted to modern and contemporary art. At Christie’s paintings by Cézanne, Magritte or Picasso estimated at several million euros must also go under the hammer.
A masterpiece by Kandinsky, Murnau with church IIrecently recovered by the heirs of its owner, a German Jew killed by the Nazis, was sold for nearly 42 million euros on Wednesday evening in London, a new auction record for this artist according to Sotheby’s.
“Kandinsky’s early works are rarely brought to market, the bulk of them being found in major museum collections around the world,” the auction house pointed out.
The painting was sold for 37.2 million pounds sterling (41.9 million euros).
An oil on canvas painted in 1910
This work by Vassily Kandinsky, approximately one meter by one meter, offers a colorful vision of the German village of Murnau, its pointed roofs and the spire of its church, stretched out just like the peaks of the Bavarian Alps.
This oil on canvas, painted in 1910, a pivotal moment in the work of the Russian painter, has long adorned the dining room of Johanna Margarete and Siegbert Stern, founders of a prosperous textile company.
This couple at the heart of Berlin’s cultural life in the 1920s, who frequented Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka or Albert Einstein, had built up an impressive collection of around a hundred paintings and drawings which adorned their interior.
Another painting sold 19 million
If Siegbert Stern died of natural causes in 1935, his wife Johanna Margarette had to flee persecution and Germany before finally being the victim of the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis in Auschwitz in May 1944.
It was only almost 10 years ago that Murnau Eye Church II was identified in a museum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, where it had been since 1951. It was returned last year to the Stern heirs, whose 13 survivors will share the proceeds of the sale.
“While nothing can undo the misdeeds of the past,” the heirs emphasized, “the return of this painting that meant so much to our great-grandparents has immense significance for us, as it is recognition and it closes partially a wound that had remained open through the generations”.
Also auctioned during the evening was a four-meter-long painting by Edward Munch, Dance on the beach (1906), sheltered from the Nazis in a barn in the heart of the Norwegian forest and which was the subject of a restitution agreement.
In the foreground of the canvas are two great loves of the artist, two liaisons that ended in pain. The painting was sold for 16.9 million pounds sterling (19 million euros).