: Purchased by the museum from the art dealer K.A. Légat
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: Museum inventory
1951 <> heden
: Van Abbemuseum [nl]
:
Current restitution status
Restituted
: 2022: The Restitutions Committee announced a second binding opinion on 12 September 2022. It advised the municipality of Eindhoven to return the painting Blick auf Murnau mit Kirche by Wassily Kandinsky to the heirs of its former owner. The municipality of Eindhoven and the Van Abbemuseum purchased the work in 1951. This second binding opinion was preceded by additional research, which lasted two years and yielded new material. In the first binding opinion of 29 January 2018, the application for restitution was rejected; it could not be established with the required degree of plausibility that the work had been misappropriated from Johanna Margarethe Stern-Lippmann (1874-1944), the Jewish (great-)grandmother of the applicants, during the Nazi regime. The full recommendation can be found on the website of the Restitutions Committee (file number RC 5.178). 2018: The Restitutions Committee has issued a binding opinion about the application for restitution of the painting Blick auf Murnau mit Kirche by Wassily Kandinsky, currently in the possession of Eindhoven City Council. The Committee takes the view that the city council is not obliged to restitute the work.
Research findings
When and from whom Légat art gallery acquired this painting is no longer known. Who the former owner 'A. Kaufmann' was and how the painting was lost is no longer known.
The museum acquired this painting in 1951 from Légat art gallery in The Hague. The old museum inventory card states 'Formerly of A. Kaufmann's collection, whose daughter in the Netherlands sold it to Légat (opg. Légat).' Given that Kaufmann is a common Jewish name and the nature of this entartete painting, it is possible that the provenance of this work is problematic. A search on Internet and at RKD, NBI and catalogues of Kandinsky's oeuvre have turned up several possible candidates for the name A. Kaufmann, yet there can be little certainty regarding the former owner, or the reason why it was given away.
