Nazi-looted Georg Kolbe fountain sells for record €4m at Villa Grisebach auction

A fountain by German sculptor Georg Kolbe, looted by the Nazis in the 1930s, sold for €4 million (with fees) at Villa Grisebach's summer auction in Berlin on June 4, 2026, setting a new auction record for the artist. The work, Tänzerinnen-Brunnen (Dancer's Fountain), had been in the collection of Berlin's Georg Kolbe Museum since the 1970s. In 2024, the museum initiated a research project that led to its restitution to the descendants of Heinrich Stahl, a prominent Jewish community member who commissioned the fountain in 1922 and was murdered in the Theresienstadt ghetto. The fountain features a bronze dancer and limestone figures of three Somali men, reflecting colonial representational conventions. The museum's director Kathleen Reinhardt stated that collections are "living matter" open to reinterpretation. The sale smashed Kolbe's previous record of €1.4m, also set at Grisebach in 2025. Other auction highlights included Emil Nolde's Astern (1919) reaching €800,000 and two Edvard Munch prints exceeding estimates. The museum commissioned a video work by Afro-Jewish artist David Hartt to engage with the sculpture's racialized depictions.