LONDON — Wassily Kandinsky’s masterpiece “Murnau mit Kirche II,” or “Murnau with Church II,” recently recovered by the descendants of a German Jewish owner killed by the Nazis, sold for $45 million Wednesday, the artist a record auctioneer for Sotheby’s.
The 1910 painting, a colorful vision of the German village of Murnau with church spires spread out like the peaks of the Bavarian Alps, marked the beginning of the Russian master’s move toward abstraction.
Oil works once adorned the dining room of Johanna Margarethe Stern and Siegbert Stern, the Jewish couple founders of a textile company.
At the center of the cultural life of Berlin in the 1920s, counting Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka and Albert Einstein among his circle, he built up a collection of nearly 100 paintings and drawings.
Siegbert Stern died of natural causes in 1935. His wife fled to the Netherlands but died in Auschwitz in May 1944 after being captured by the Nazis.
“Murnau mit Kirche II” was identified only a decade ago in a museum in the Dutch city of Eindhoven, where it had been since 1951.
It was returned last year to Stern’s heirs, whose 13 survivors will share the proceeds. These include a family member who was in hiding during the war.
The painting “Murnau with Church II” by Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky in 1910 is displayed during a media preview of a Sotheby’s auction in London, Wednesday, Feb. 22, 2023. (AP Photo / Qin Cheung)
“Nothing can undo the mistakes of the past,” the family said in a statement.
But the restoration of the painting was “extremely important to us, because it is an acknowledgment and partially closes a wound that has been left open for generations.”
Also up for auction was Edvard Munch’s 1906 “Dance on the Beach”, which was sheltered by the Nazis in a barn in the Norwegian woods and which has been the subject of a restitution agreement.
The painting fetched £16.9 million ($20 million, 19 million euros).
A František Kupka painting, “Complex” (1912), that once belonged to actor Sean Connery, sold for £4.6 million. Proceeds will go to the Connery Foundation, which operates in Scotland and the Bahamas.
The sale is part of a series of auctions in London dedicated to modern and contemporary art.
