Restituted Georg Kolbe fountain made €4m in Berlin, a record for the sculptor

Georg Kolbe’s ‘Tänzerinnen-Brunnen’ (Dancer’s Fountain, 1922) sold for €4m at Villa Grisebach in Berlin on 4 June 2026, an auction record for the German sculptor, The Art Newspaper reported. Villa Grisebach did not say whether the price includes fees, and no hammer price or estimate was given.

The previous record for a Kolbe statue was €1.4m, also set at Grisebach, in 2025. The fountain was the star lot of the first evening of the house’s summer auctions in Berlin.

Until last year the work was installed at the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin. In 2024 the museum began a research project into the fountain, and it was then restituted to the descendants of its commissioner, a prominent member of Berlin’s Jewish community who, The Art Newspaper said, was murdered in the Theresienstadt ghetto. The sale came 85 years after the Nazis looted the work.

Other lots that evening included Emil Nolde’s ‘Astern’ (1919), which reached its upper estimate of €800,000, and two early prints by Edvard Munch, which exceeded their upper estimates at €350,000 and €145,000.

The fountain pairs a bronze of a white female dancer with three crouching Somali men in limestone. The museum’s website says the figures show a reliance on colonial representational conventions and the hierarchies attached to them. The museum described the restitution as a gesture acknowledging the wrong done to the family, one that does not undo the injustice.

Separately, Germany’s new Court of Arbitration for Nazi-looted cultural property took over from the previous German commission on 1 December 2025, according to the Center for Art Law.