Bild mit Häusern, known as Painting with Houses, shows what looks like a row of houses and a human figure rendered in primary colors.
As of this week the painting has an estimated value of more than $20 million and its ownership has been transferred from the museum to heirs of a Jewish couple who were forced to sell it during World War II, according to NPR.
Russian master Wassily Kandinsky painted the piece in 1909. It then found a home in the Netherlands with Robert Lewenstein and his wife Irma Klein, who were forced to auction it off in to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam for a fraction of its value at the time as they fled the Nazis in October 1940.
“He paid 160 guilders for it – a pittance of the original value at the time, 2000 to 3000 guilders,” said Amsterdam new outlet Het Parool.
“As a city, we bear a great responsibility for dealing with the indescribable suffering and injustice inflicted on the Jewish population in the Second World War,” Amsterdam Deputy Mayor Touria Meliani said in a statement about the piece.
According to NPR, the transfer of Bild mit Häusern ends a nearly decade-long dispute about the work. Last year, Lewenstein and Klein’s heirs Lodged an appeal against a 2018 Dutch Restitutions Commission decision to allow the Stedelijk Museum to keep the paining in its collection, said artnet.com.
NPR said the Dutch Restitutions Commission, which rules in cases of ownership of artifacts looted during Nazi occupation, conducted a five-year investigation before its 2018 decision. An attempt to appeal the decision also failed in 2020.
“The municipality and the heirs agree that the restitution does justice to the principle of returning works of art that were involuntarily removed from possession during the Second World War due to circumstances directly related to the Nazi regime to heirs of the then owners where possible,” the museum said Monday.
“To the extent that anything can be restored, we as a society have a moral duty to act accordingly. This certainly applies to the many works of art that were in the possession of Jewish citizens and were looted by Nazis or were otherwise lost to the owners,” Meliani said.
Lewenstein and Klein, who had an art collection that included works by Van Gogh, Renoir and Rembrandt, were not the only Jewish people who lost their art as Nazis invaded Europe. According to the Jewish Museum, “untold numbers of artworks and pieces of cultural property were stolen by Nazi forces,” during World War II. An estimated one million artworks and 2.5 million books were recovered since the war ended in 1945.
Some of these other works have also been returned the heirs of the families who lost them, said the museum.
“Today marks the beginning of a new chapter in the journey of the Lewenstein family to achieve the justice, dignity and respect that they have been rightfully seeking for so many years,” said James Palmer of the Mondex Corporation, which helps with restitution negotiations.
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