Story By: Georgina Jadikovska, Sub-Editor: Marija Stojkoska, Agency: Newsflash
A lost watercolour painting which was made by Russian expressionist painter Wassily Kandinsky has reappeared after 70 years in an auction house in the German city of Munich.
The aquarelle masterpiece painted on paper but originally mounted on cardboard named “Curved tips”, which was created by Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky in 1927, will finally see the light of day after it disappeared over 70 years ago.
It was widely exhibited at the time and apparently smuggled out of Berlin to escape the Nazis by its creator when he fled with his wife to Paris, and he later handed it to an art dealer who sold it after his death after which its whereabouts were lost.
The watercolour painting, which was exhibited in European galleries until 1932 but then disappeared after the art dealer sold it in 1949, will be auctioned at the Ketterer Kunst auction house in the city of Munich in the German state of Bavaria between 17th and 19th June.
According to the auction house, the artwork, which has been estimated at between EUR 250,000 and 300,000 (GBP 216,000 and 260,000) comes from a private owner’s collection from the Rhineland region in western Germany.
The auction house also declared that the painting, which features strict geometric compositions, is considered one of Kandinsky’s most sought-after works on paper because of its rareness and high quality.
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky (16th December 1866 – 13th December 1944) was a Russian expressionist painter and art theorist who is credited as the pioneer of abstract art. He spent his childhood in the city of Odessa in today’s Ukraine where he graduated at Grekov Odessa Art school.
Kandinsky changed his pre-war expressionist style and leaned towards abstract art in the period between 1914 and 1921 when he started introducing geometrical forms in his creations.
Perplexed by the abstract, 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 centre.
This resulted in his highly complex, multi-shaped and multicoloured compositions in his work where tamed outlines and clear colours were a distinctive trait.
According to the Ketterer Kunst auction house in the city of Munich, Kandinsky’s masterpiece “Curved tips” is a unique example of his pedagogical teaching in which he tests the relationships between forms, lines and surfaces and where certain basic colours correspond to basic forms (for example yellow corresponds to triangles, red to squares and blue to circles).
The 48-centimetre long and 32,2-centimetre wide painting already has an exciting exhibition history in galleries in cities such as Berlin, Paris, The Hague, Brussels, Halle and Stockholm, before Kandinsky stopped promoting it in 1932.
After the Bauhaus, which was a German art school that combined crafts and the fine arts, was closed in the city of Berlin by the Gestapo (Nazi Secret State Police) Kandinsky and his wife Nina moved to the city of Paris in France in December 1933.
Experts presume that the pair carried the painting in their luggage following a customs stamp on its back.
According to the auction house, Kandinsky gave the watercolour painting to art dealer Rudolf Probst before his death in 1944, who then sold it according to notes found by Nina Kandinsky where the painting’s name is crossed out and marked as “sold” in the city of Mannheim in 1949.
Before its rediscovery in a small privately owned art gallery in the Rhineland region of Germany, the only clue about the painting’s existence was a sketch made on a piece of paper by American art historian Vivian Endicott Barnett at an unknown location as indicated on the small paper sheet.
The CEO of Ketterer Kunst, Robert Ketterer, said: “This is so satisfying. Numerous Kandinsky researchers have dealt with this artwork but for decades its exact location was unknown.”
Ketterer Kunst is an auction house and art gallery formed in the city of Stuttgart in 1954, which is currently headquartered in the Bavarian city of Munich and holds branches in the cities of Hamburg, Berlin and Dusseldorf in Germany.
The company which has a worldwide network of representatives including ones in the USA and Brazil has been placing in focus on art created in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.
“Curved tips” can be seen in the German cities of Frankfurt (28th May), Dusseldorf (30th and 31st May), Hamburg (2nd and 3rd June), Berlin (from 5th until 10th June) before it moves to Munich from 12th to 18th June.
