Smuggled out of Nazi Germany by the artist, the watercolor could fetch up to $409,000 at auction.
Smuggled out of Nazi Germany by the artist, the watercolor could fetch up to $409,000 at auction.
A 1927 watercolor painting by Russian expressionist painter Wassily Kandinsky has reappeared after 70 years and is now in an auction house in Munich, Germany.
The aquarelle masterpiece, painted on paper and originally mounted on backing board, is titled “Gebogene Spitzen” (“Curved Tips”), with an estimated value of $292,500-$409,500, as listed by auction house Ketterer Kunst, which called the find a “spectacular rediscovery.”
The painting, which was widely exhibited at the time, was in the artist’s possession and apparently smuggled out of Berlin in 1933 after the Nazis shut down the Bauhaus, a German art school in Berlin. Kandinsky and his wife fled to Paris. Experts presume that the pair carried the painting in their luggage.
The artist died in 1944, and his widow, Nina Kandinsky, had possession of the painting until 1949, when it was sold to German art dealer Rudolf Probst, according to the auction house. That was the last record of the painting until it was found in the estate of a private collector in North Rhine-Westphalia.
The only clue about the painting’s existence came from an annotated catalog of Vivian Endicott Barnett: A tiny sketch made from memory inscribed ‘Location: Unknown.’
In its description of the painting, the auction house posted: “The strictly geometric compositions from the Bauhaus years are the artist’s most sought-after works on paper on the international auction market.
“With its balanced construction between motion and resting stability, it is a prime example of the theory that Kandinsky conceived in ‘Punkt und Linie zu Fläche’ (Point and Line to Plane, 1926).”
Kandinsky, who was born in 1866, is credited as the pioneer of abstract art. He spent his childhood in Odessa, now in the Ukraine, and graduated from Grekov Odessa Art School.
He changed his pre-war expressionist style and leaned toward abstract art between 1914 and 1921, when he started introducing geometrical forms in his work. He became obsessed with geometrical structures, circles and triangles that float freely in space, crossing and penetrating each other or being grouped around an imaginary center.
This fascination resulted in his highly complex, multishaped and multicolored compositions with distinct outlines and clear colors.
“Curved Tips” will be on exhibit in Frankfurt (May 28), Dusseldorf (May 30-31), Hamburg (June 2-3) and Berlin (June 5-10) before going on auction on June 18.
(Edited by Judith Isacoff and Fern Siegel)
