A German commission has recommended that a Wassily Kandinsky painting, currently owned by a Bavarian state bank, be returned to the descendants of the Jewish family who originally owned it.
The painting, titled A Colorful Life, was once part of the art collection of Emanuel Lewenstein, a Dutch art collector. After Lewenstein’s death in 1933, his wife loaned the painting to a museum in Amsterdam. However, both Lewenstein and his wife died in the 1930s and their children fled the Netherlands before the Nazi invasion in 1940. That same year, the painting was sold at an auction in Amsterdam.
The Bavarian state bank purchased the painting in 1972 and it has been on loan to a museum in Munich since then. The descendants of the Lewenstein family filed a lawsuit in New York in 2017 claiming that the painting was sold without their permission and should rightfully belong to them. The commission, which deals with restitution cases related to Nazi persecution, has recommended that the painting be returned to the family. While the bank has suggested that the painting may have been voluntarily auctioned during divorce proceedings, the commission believes it was seized as a result of Nazi persecution.
Although the commission’s decision is not legally binding, the bank’s largest shareholder, the state government of Bavaria, has indicated that it will accept the decision. The family has expressed interest in lending the painting to another museum. Mondex Corporation, a Canadian company that works with families to reclaim looted art and represents the Lewenstein heirs, has been working with the family to track down around 100 other paintings that were looted from them during the war.
