A masterpiece of his Wassily Kandinsky, stolen by the Nazis, sold at auction in London for a record £37.2 million. It should be noted that the Nazis killed the owner of the painting in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944.

The masterpiece from 1910 titled ‘Murnau mit Kirche II’ was sold at Sotheby’s auction house on behalf of the owner’s great-grandchildren, who recently came across the painting discovered in a museum in Eindhoven, Holland.

The descendants of Johanna Margarethe Stern-Lippmann and Siegbert Stern, founders of a textile company and keen art collectors, said they would use some of the proceeds from the sale to try to locate more of the family’s vast art collection seized by the Nazis in the 1930s.

The painting, which depicts the Bavarian village of Murnau in an ‘explosion’ of colour, had hung in the couple’s dining room at their villa in Potsdam, Berlin.

The £37.2m sale to a previously unknown telephone bidder was the star of Sotheby’s auction of 36 modern and contemporary works this week. The previous highest price paid at auction for a Kandinsky was £33m for ‘Painting with White Lines’ (1913), sold in 2017.

Its original owners were friends with some of the most influential writers and thinkers of their time, including Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka and Albert Einstein. The couple’s collection included over 100 works of art by great painters.

Everything changed, however, after the Nazis came to power. Although Stern died of natural causes in 1935, the family was forced to flee Germany and he was later murdered in Auschwitz. Their impressive art collection was looted and scattered throughout the region. The location of many of the paintings is still unknown.

The painting “Murnau mit Kirche II” was discovered almost 10 years ago on the walls of the museum in Eindhoven, Netherlands, where it had been hanging since 1951. After a long legal battle it was attributed last year to the 13 descendants of the Stern family.

“While nothing can undo the mistakes of the past, nor the effects on our family, the return of this painting, which meant so much to our great-grandparents, is extremely important to us. It is recognition and closes – in part – a wound that has remained open over the generations,” the family said.