Paul Robert Ernst von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (born 14 November 1875 in Berlin; died 10 May 1935) was a German Jewish banker and art collector. The persecution of his family under the Nazis has resulted in numerous lawsuits for restitution.
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Paul Robert Ernst von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (born 14 November 1875 in Berlin; died 10 May 1935) was a German Jewish banker and art collector. The persecution of his family under the Nazis has resulted in numerous lawsuits for restitution.
Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy was the eldest son of the banker Ernst von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1846–1909) and Marie, née Warschauer (1855–1906), a granddaughter of Alexander Mendelssohn. After a few months at Balliol College in Oxford, studying law in Bonn and Berlin, and joining the Society of Friends in 1901, he became a partner in the family bank Mendelssohn & Co. in early 1902. A few months later, he married Charlotte Reichenheim. The couple remained childless. After the divorce, he married Elsa Lucy Emmy Lolo von Lavergne-Péguilhen (born 8 January 1899 in Strasbourg; died 11 March 1986).
Together with his first wife, Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy built a collection of the finest quality paintings by Pablo Picasso (Boy with Horse and Le Moulin de La Galette) [1] in the Stadtpalais Alsenstrasse 3 / 3a (architect: Bruno Paul) and in Schloss Börnicke (rebuilt by the same architect), [2] Vincent van Gogh ("Sunflowers", "Mutter Roulin im Profil, mit ihren Bab"y, "St. Paul's Krankenhaus", "Junges Mädschen mit Kornblume" and "Trunk of an old yellow tree" [3] ). They also owned artworks by Claude Monet, Edouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Georges Braque [4] as well as by Henri Rousseau, Dégas, Cézanne, Derain, and Toulouse-Lautrec. [3]
When the Nazis rose to power in 1933, von Mendelssohn-Bartholdly was persecuted because of his Jewish origin. [5] Nazi laws designed to ostracize, bankrupt and plunder the Jews were applied to the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy family.
Much controversy surrounds the circumstances under which Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and his heirs relinquished the artworks in his collection, under the Third Reich's racial laws, which forced family members into exile and the destruction via Aryanisation of their bank Mendelssohn & Co.
A series of lawsuits demanding the restitution of the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy artworks was initiated in 2008 by the heirs of Mendelssohn, with Julius H. Schoeps as their spokesman. [6] [7] The artworks claimed included:
There was also a question concerning the Picasso's Boy with a Pipe which Mendelssohn-Bartoldy's widow had sold to Walter Feilchenfeldt, Zürich, who sold it to Mr. and Mrs. John Hay Whitney in 1950. [17]
Franz Moritz Wilhelm Marc was a German painter and printmaker, one of the key figures of German Expressionism. He was a founding member of Der Blaue Reiter, a journal whose name later became synonymous with the circle of artists collaborating in it.
Garçon à la Pipe is an oil on canvas painting by Pablo Picasso. It was painted in 1905 when Picasso was 24 years old, during his Rose Period, soon after he settled in the Montmartre area of Paris. The painting depicts a Parisian adolescent boy who holds a pipe in his left hand and wears a garland of flowers on his head, surrounded by two floral decorations. The subject was a local boy named "P’tit Louis" who died at a young age. The painting is listed as one of the most expensive paintings, after being sold at Sotheby's auction for $104 million on 5 May 2004. It is currently the fifth highest selling painting by Picasso.
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Jeune garçon au cheval is an oil on canvas painting by Pablo Picasso. The painting is housed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It was painted in Picasso's Rose Period from 1905 to 1906, when he was still a struggling artist living in Paris. The painting is a study for a much larger composition that Picasso never completed.
The Mendelssohn family are the descendants of Mendel of Dessau. The German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and his brother Saul were the first to adopt the surname Mendelssohn. The family includes his grandson, the composer Felix Mendelssohn and his granddaughter, the composer Fanny Mendelssohn.
Alfred Flechtheim was a German Jewish art dealer, art collector, journalist and publisher persecuted by the Nazis.
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Justin K. Thannhauser (1892–1976) was a German art dealer and collector who was an important figure in the development and dissemination of modern art in Europe.
Woman Ironing is a 1904 oil painting by Pablo Picasso that was completed during the artist's Blue Period (1901—1904). This evocative image, painted in neutral tones of blue and gray, depicts an emaciated woman with hollowed eyes, sunken cheeks, and bent form, as she presses down on an iron with all her will. A recurrent subject matter for Picasso during this time is the desolation of social outsiders. This painting, as the rest of his works of the Blue Period, is inspired by his life in Spain but was painted in Paris.
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Max Silberberg was a major cultural figure in Breslau, a German Jewish entrepreneur, art collector and patron who was robbed and murdered by the Nazis. His art collection, among the finest of its era, has been the object of numerous restitution claims.
Alexander Vömel, or Voemel, was a German gallery owner and Nazi party member who took over the gallery of the Jewish art dealer Alfred Flechtheim when it was Aryanized in 1933.
Heinrich Thannhauser was a German gallery owner and art collector. As an art dealer, he was one of the most important promoters of early Expressionist art in Germany.
Margarete Oppenheim was a German art collector and patron. She was among the first personalities to collect works of modern art in Germany and owned one of the largest collection in Germany.
Le Moulin de la Galette is an oil painting on canvas created in 1900 by Pablo Picasso, and currently owned by the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy was a relative of the composer Felix Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn and Co., the bank his family established in 1795, was one of Germany's five largest privately owned banks. Mendelssohn-Bartholdy's collection also included works by Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Edouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Georges Braque.
The heirs of Mendelssohn-Bartholdy have previously reached settlements with the current owners of three other Picassos they claim Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy was forced to sell at the same time as "Head of a Woman." They include "Boy Leading a Horse," now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art; "Le Moulin de la Galette," now in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and "Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto" (also known as "The Absinthe Drinker"). The latter was sold at a Christie's auction in London for $51.8 million, with commission, to a private collector by the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation after the foundation had reached a settlement with the heirs.
Another declaratory judgment action, filed by the MoMA and the Guggenheim, sought to shut down the claims of Julius Schoeps, heir to Paul Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, for paintings that passed throughThannhauser's hands.2 77 The museums alleged that it is simply implausible and contrary to common sense to suggest that any Jewish art dealer would take advantage of a fellow Jew.278
Schoeps, a descendant of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and the composer Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, has joined 29 other heirs of the Berlin banker Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy in requesting the return of the Picasso painting "Madame Soler" from the Bavarian State Painting Collections.
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