A painting by Wassily Kandinsky, stolen by the Nazis who killed its owner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944, has sold at an auction in London for £37.2 million.

A 1910 masterpiece called “Murnau mit Kirche II” (“Murnau with Church II”) was sold at Sotheby’s on behalf of the owner’s great-grandchildren, who had recently come across a painting discovered in a museum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.

Descendants of Joanna Margaret Stern-Lippmann and Siegbert Stern, founders of textiles and art collectors, said they would use part of the proceeds from the sale to try to find more works from the vast family collection confiscated by the Nazis in the 1930s. .

A painting depicting the Bavarian village of Murnau in vibrant colors hung in the couple’s dining room at their villa in Potsdam, Berlin.

The work took center stage in this week’s auction and set a new record for a Kandinsky painting. The previous highest price at Sotheby’s for a Kandinsky painting was £33 million for A Painting with White Lines (1913).

The original owners of Murnau with Church II were friends with some of the most influential writers and intellectuals of their time, including Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka and Albert Einstein. The couple’s collection included over 100 works of art, ranging from the Old Dutch to contemporary artists such as Munch and Kandinsky.

However, everything changed with the fact that the Nazis “came” to power. Although Stern died in 1935 of natural causes, Stern-Lippmann was forced to leave Germany. He was later killed in Auschwitz. Their amazing collection was looted and scattered throughout the region. The location of many of these works is still unknown.

“Murnau with Church II” was discovered almost 10 years ago within the walls of the Van Abe Museum in Eindhoven, where it has been located since 1951. After a long legal battle, it was restored last year by 13 descendants of the Stern family.

According to The Guardian