Kandinsky’s painting was sold at Sotheby’s auction for a record sum
Wassily Kandinsky’s painting “View of Murnau with Church II” was sold at Sotheby’s auction in London for 37.2 million pounds (almost 45 million dollars) – this is a new auction record for the artist’s works. The name of the buyer is not disclosed.
Kandinsky painted the canvas in 1910, a period of transition from figurativeness to abstraction. The work was included in a series of landscapes of the German city of Murnau. The artist lived there at the beginning of the 20th century.
“View of Murnau with Church II” has been in the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, since 1951, but at the end of last year the canvas was returned to the heirs of Siegbert and Johanna Margaret Stern, from whom it was confiscated by the Nazis.
The previous auction record for works by Kandinsky was set in 2017. Then the “Picture with White Lines” was sold at auction for almost 42 million dollars. Kandinsky wrote it in 1913.
- Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866. In 1971, the family moved to Odessa, where Kandinsky graduated from high school and received art and music education.
- After the revolution of 1917, Kandinsky, among other things, was involved in the organization of the protection of monuments and the creation of the Russian Academy of Arts. In 1921, he moved to Berlin and in 1922 began teaching at the Bauhaus school of architecture.
- In 1928, the artist received German citizenship, but after the Nazis came to power in 1933, he moved to Paris. In 1939, he received French citizenship. He died on December 13, 1944. Buried near Paris.
