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Twenty paintings by the Caribbean British abstract painter Winston Branch have been recovered after they disappeared without trace nearly five decades ago.
“Those works were stolen from his studio because he wasn’t able to pay the rent back in the 1970s,” his agent, Varvara Roza, told the Guardian. “This is shocking, isn’t it?”
Branch, 78, is now represented in the Tate, the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, among other public collections. Collectors have paid more than £400,000 for his paintings, while his auction record is about £240,000, the price reached in 2023 at Christie’s London for The Magic is in You, a shimmering abstract painting that recalls Monet’s Nymphéas.
Branch was distraught after his early figurative paintings disappeared from a warehouse studio that he had rented in Berlin aged 28. Travelling frequently to New York, after being offered a Guggenheim Fellowship in the late 1970s, he had returned to Germany to find that his entire studio had been emptied.
His paintings and personal effects had been removed without any warning – all because he had not paid two months’ rent, he later discovered. He told the Guardian: “The owners of the building … wouldn’t speak any English and my German was not the best at that time.
“They were very rude and arrogant. If they’d given me […] time, I would have resolved the problem, but they were very brutal … I didn’t pay my rent, unfortunately, because I was living from hand to mouth.
“If my lawyer was competent, I could have fought it in the court, because you cannot enter into a building without giving the tenant notice. It was a difficult moment in my life.”
Unable to track down the paintings, he had given up all hope of seeing them again: “I felt my whole life was gone.”
The works have now surfaced after the German owner decided to sell them through Galerie Volker Diehl in Berlin, which in turn contacted Branch. The artist has now learned that the paintings had been sold in Berlin by the studio’s landlord to an architect, who bought them in good faith, taking them to his home in Greece.
While the missing pictures are figurative, Branch is best known for abstracts inspired by nature, explorations of light and colour that evoke subjects such as gardens in bloom.
Roza said: “Winston is known all over the world for tempestuous abstract works that unfold like visual poetry, but these … early figurative works provide a window into the evolution of his painting.”
The recovered paintings needed some repair and Branch has worked on their restoration. This September, they will be displayed for the first time at Galerie Volker Diehl.
As early works, they are priced between £95,000 and £150,000. Branch will get a percentage of the sales, avoiding a “long legal battle” over the ownership, he said, although he had been initially dismayed because he felt that the works belonged to him, Roza said.
He decided to buy one painting for himself: “That’s the painting that I really wanted … because the woman in [it is] the mother of my second daughter.
“I painted her first with her clothes on and secondly without her clothes on. I was testing my ability to have real descriptiveness in painting.”
A symbolic price of €10,000 was agreed, far lower than its market value, as he understood that the owner had to be compensated, he said. He will hang it in his London studio when it arrives from Berlin.
Volker Diehl, a Germany gallery owner, described the paintings as “absolutely stunning”.
