Kandinsky’s The Colourful Life sells for £27 million in London

Wassily Kandinsky’s The Colourful Life sold at Christie’s in London on October 14 for £27 million, RBC reported from the auction broadcast. It was offered by the heirs of the family to whom it was restituted in 2023.

Bidding began at £11 million. The reported result exceeded the upper estimate but remained below Kandinsky’s auction record. His View of Murnau with Church II sold at Sotheby’s for £37.2 million in 2023.

Kandinsky painted The Colourful Life in Paris in March 1907. Christie’s catalogue identifies the medium as tempera and gouache on canvas and gives its dimensions as 130.5 by 162.6 centimetres. The scene includes pilgrims, peasants, religious figures, a couple and a mother with a child. Christie’s places the work within Kandinsky’s transition towards abstraction and links it to Russian folklore and Fauvism.

Industrialist Emanuel Albert Lewenstein acquired the painting in November 1927. After his death in 1930, it passed to Hedwig Lewenstein-Weyermann and later their children. In October 1940, following the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, the painting was sold at auction in Amsterdam.

Bayerische Landesbank acquired it in 1972. It remained on long-term loan to the Lenbachhaus from December 1973. The heirs sought its return and filed a lawsuit against the bank in 2017.

In 2023, a German advisory commission on art lost under Nazi persecution recommended restitution. The painting was returned to the heirs of Hedwig Lewenstein-Weyermann that June.