Seized in 1940, Sold for £31.6 Million: Kandinsky's Das bunte Leben Leads Christie's London

A painting seized from a Jewish family in Amsterdam in 1940, and seen by visitors to a Munich museum for half a century, has become the most expensive work sold during London’s Frieze Week in five years. On the evening of 14 October 2026, Wassily Kandinsky’s Das bunte Leben (The Colourful Life), painted in 1907, sold at Christie’s London for £31,560,000 with fees, about 1.8 million, after almost six minutes of bidding. It was offered by the heirs of Hedwig Lewenstein-Weyermann, to whom it was restituted in 2023.

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VIII, 1923: circles, triangles, lines and grids in black, blue, red and yellow on a pale ground — Wassily Kandinsky, **Composition VIII**, 1923. Oil on canvas. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Public Domain artwork. Not the painting sold at Christie’s, but where the path that began with *Das bunte Leben* led; the link opens this painting as a print in the Sapiens Verbum print shop.

🎨 Get Kandinsky’s Composition VIII as a print →

Quick facts
What: Wassily Kandinsky’s Das bunte Leben (The Colourful Life, also known as La vie mélangée), 1907
Where: Christie’s, King Street, London, 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale
When: 14 October 2026
Price: £31,560,000 with fees (about 1.8 million); estimate £18–25 million
Who: Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), sold by the heirs of Hedwig Lewenstein-Weyermann
Section: Art Market

What happened

Christie’s opened its Frieze Week evening sales with two auctions that together made £218.6 million, more than double the equivalent sales last year. The Kandinsky was the top lot. Auctioneer Adrien Meyer introduced it as “the most important early Kandinsky to come to auction”, according to Artnet News, and it sold above its high estimate. Christie’s says it became the highest-value lot of the London October season in the past five years. The same evening, Piet Mondrian’s Composition III of 1920 made £25,235,000.

From Amsterdam to Munich and back

The Amsterdam collectors Emanuel and Hedwig Lewenstein bought the painting in 1927. After Emanuel’s death it was lent to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. According to the German Advisory Commission on Nazi-looted art, it was collected from the museum on 5 September 1940, a few months into the German occupation, and auctioned on 9 October 1940 at Frederik Muller & Co in Amsterdam as part of the Lewenstein estate. The buyer was the collector Salomon B. Slijper. In 1972 his widow sold it to the Bayerische Landesbank, which placed it on long-term loan to the Lenbachhaus in Munich, where it stayed on public view for more than fifty years.

The Lewensteins’ children spent decades tracing their parents’ collection. In 2023 the Advisory Commission recommended that the bank return the painting to the heirs, and the restitution took place in June 2023.

Why it matters

The sale shows how restitution is reshaping the market for modern masterpieces: works that seemed permanently fixed in museum or corporate collections are returning to families and then, often, to auction. It also means that a painting the public could see freely in Munich for half a century has now passed into private hands. The buyer has not been named.

The painting behind the story

Das bunte Leben belongs to Kandinsky’s early years, before abstraction. Christie’s describes it as a panoramic landscape drawn from the folk tales of his native Russia, crowded with figures and painted in sharp, acid colours; it was shown at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1907. Within a few years Kandinsky would leave recognisable subjects behind altogether. Composition VIII, painted in 1923 when he was teaching at the Bauhaus, is one of the destinations of that journey: circles, triangles and lines arranged like music, with no story left at all. Seen together, the two pictures span the road from fairy tale to pure abstraction. For more modern painting, explore the paintings we’ve explained.

🎨 Bring Kandinsky Home
Hang Kandinsky’s Composition VIII as a print, canvas or poster from the Sapiens Verbum print shop.

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VIII, 1923, as a framed print on a wall

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💬 Over to you: When a restituted painting leaves a public museum and goes to auction, is justice done, or is something lost? Tell us in the comments.

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