The postcard that helped reopen a Kandinsky claim

A church tower rises above Kandinsky’s patchwork of fields and rooftops in Murnau mit Kirche II. Johanna Margarethe Stern-Lippmann and her husband, Siegbert Samuel Stern, collected the canvas. A family will from 1924 and a prewar photograph supported ownership. Still, the Dutch Restitutions Committee rejected the claim in 2018 because the evidence then available did not sufficiently connect the loss to Nazi rule.

In the reopened investigation, researchers found a postcard mailed in 1966 by Flory Frank-Marburger that pictured the Kandinsky. Her handwritten annotation suggested that she and her husband had once possessed it. He had acted as an intermediary for Stern-Lippmann during the occupation. The committee also checked a competing ownership story in the museum’s records against the dates and papers of the family named there and found the entry unreliable.

The 2022 binding opinion concluded that an involuntary loss during the German occupation was sufficiently plausible. Eindhoven, which had bought the picture in 1951 for the Van Abbemuseum, agreed to return it. Sotheby’s confirmed the restitution and sold the painting for the heirs at its March 2023 London auction.