Stedelijk Museum Can Keep Contested Kandinsky Painting, Dutch Court Rules

A Dutch court has ruled that the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam can keep Wassily Kandinsky’s 1909 painting Painting with Houses, marking an end to one of the most prominent pending restitution suits. The work belonged to Robert Lewenstein, who fled the Nazi-occupied Netherlands in 1940, and in the lawsuit the Lewenstein’s heirs alleged that the country’s official Restitutions Commission exhibited an “appearance of partiality and a conflict of interest” in the matter.