Kandinsky painting sold for record $45 million for artist’s works

Russian modernist artist Wassily Kandinsky’s painting “Murnau with a Church” sold at Sotheby’s in London for 37.2 million pounds ($44.55 million), informed CN.

Painted in 1910, the painting became the most expensive lot of this evening at Sotheby’s. In addition, “Murnau with the Church” set a price record for Kandinsky’s works. Previously, the most expensive of his works sold for $23.3 million.

“Kandinsky’s Murnau period predetermined the development of abstract art for generations to come,” said Helena Newman, president of Sotheby’s Europe and head of impressionism and contemporary art at the auction house. , in a press release.

Kandinsky, at the time of writing the picture, lived in the Bavarian town of Murnau with his girlfriend Gabriele Münter and other artists. The idea of ​​a landscape with a church came to him during a bike ride.

The image has an interesting fate. Before World War II, it belonged to Berlin collectors Johanna and Siegbert Stern. Fleeing the Holocaust, Johanna Stern (her husband had died by this time) moved to the Netherlands, taking the painting with her. After the occupation of the Netherlands by the Nazis, Johanna Stern was taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where she died in 1944. The painting passed to a certain Dutch art dealer who sold it in 1951 to the Van Abbe Museum . Last year, the museum returned the painting to the living heirs of the Sterns.