TEFAF Maastricht, one of the world's largest art fairs, opens this weekend featuring a rare Van Gogh and record-breaking Kandinsky masterpiece with $4.9 million sale.The painting is offered by the American gallery M.S. Rau from New Orleans, which did not disclose an asking price. / Photo: AFP
Among the many pieces up for grabs, which include famous names like Manet, Rubens and Rodin, the undisputed stars of the show are two paintings: Van Gogh's"Tete de paysanne a la coiffe blanche" and Kandinsky's"Murnau mit Kirche II". "There is bound to be a lot of interest" from buyers, she told AFP. Van Gogh made the painting while living with his parents in the southern Dutch town of Nuenen the year before he painted his other famous work from the period, the 1885"The Potato Eaters".
A colourful vision of the German village of Murnau with its church spire stretched like the peaks of the Bavarian Alps, heralded the Russian master's move towards abstraction. His wife fled to the Netherlands but died in Auschwitz in May 1944 after being captured by the Nazis."Murnau Mit Kirche II" was identified only a decade ago in a museum in the Dutch city of Eindhoven, where it had been since 1951.