March 3, 2017, by Colin Moynihan and Alison Smale – Excerpt
March 3, 2017, by Colin Moynihan and Alison Smale – Excerpt
“For more than 40 years, “Colorful Life,” an important painting by Wassily Kandinsky, has hung in Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, a Munich museum where visitors have been able to appreciate the swirl of colors in a work that many experts view as a marker in this renowned Russian artist’s development from figuration to abstraction.”
“But a lawsuit filed on Friday in Federal District Court in Manhattan is demanding that the painting be returned to the heirs of a Jewish family who, the suit says, owned the painting before the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in 1940.”
“The work, created in 1907, was bought in 1972 by a bank based in Munich, Bayerische Landesbank (BayernLB), which then lent it to the museum.”
“Three heirs to the Dutch Jewish family say the work had been left in the 1930s for safekeeping with a museum in the Netherlands but was then pilfered and sold without permission.”
“But the heirs said, through their representatives, that they had not seen the point of going before the commission because the bank had stipulated in July that the painting would have to remain at the museum regardless of any outcome. James Palmer, the founder of the Mondex Corporation, an art recovery company which contacted the heirs in this case, said they believed that the bank was declining to offer any restitution.”
This is an excerpt from this New York Times article. Full article through this link: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/arts/design/heirs-sue-for-return-of-a-kandinsky-saying-it-was-looted-by-nazis.html?searchResultPosition=34
