Francesco von Mendelssohn

Francesco von Mendelssohn (born September 6, 1901 in Berlin , † September 22, 1972 in New York City ) was a German cellist and art collector.

Childhood, Artistry, and Decadence

Franz von Mendelssohn, who later Italianized his first name, was the son of the banker Robert von Mendelssohn and his wife Giulietta, nee. Gordigiani. She was a daughter of the portrait painter Michele Gordigiani . After Robert von Mendelssohn died in 1917, she moved to Italy and gave her children Eleonora and Francesco the family villa at Koenigsallee 16 in Berlin-Grunewald , which housed numerous antiques and, above all, the family's collection of paintings. This was mainly compiled by Robert von Mendelssohn and included works by Guardi, Francisco de Goya and Rubens as well as two paintings attributed to Rembrandt : a self-portrait and a portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels . The latter was later only assigned to the Rembrandt School, but was considered a “real Rembrandt” during Mendelssohn's lifetime. From around 1910, Robert von Mendelssohn had also bought works from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including paintings by Pablo Picasso , Vincent van Gogh , Max Slevogt , Édouard Manet and Claude Monet .

Francesco von Mendelssohn bought works by Toulouse-Lautrec , Segantini and Camille Corot . But his real interest was in music and drama. Trained as a cellist as a student of Pablo Casals , he has performed in concerts all over Europe. He has given concerts as a soloist, but also with Adolf Busch's string quartet or as a member of the Klingler quartet . In his private life he played house music with Albert Einstein and Bruno Eisner .

Francesco von Mendelssohn also wrote a book about Eleonora Duse , who was a friend of his mother's and his sister's godmother. He also translated plays Luigi Pirandellos from Italian, worked as a film actor and was active as a theater director. He worked with Lotte Lenya , Peter Lorre , Fritz Kortner , Theo Lingen , Heinz Rühmann and Paul Hörbiger , among others .

Francesco von Mendelssohn was known as an eccentric in society. He drove a Lancia convertible with ermine seat covers , appeared in public in a red leather suit or yellow silk dressing gown. Ruth Landshoff and he liked to show up in swapped clothes, he in an evening dress, she in his suit. In his parents' villa in Grunewald, he organized parties, to which guests from art and politics appeared as well as young men from the homosexual milieu. He was close friends with Harald Kreutzberg , Vladimir Horowitz and Gustaf Gründgens . He had an amorous relationship. a. to Ruth Landshoff.

emigration

After the National Socialists came to power , the von Mendelssohn siblings emigrated. While Eleonora von Mendelssohn, who was married to an Austrian for the second time, initially retired to Schloss Kammer , Francesco von Mendelssohn lived mainly in Paris and Venice between 1933 and 1935 . However, he also had contacts in the USA. In 1933 he directed the Threepenny Opera on Broadway , and in the fall of 1935 he emigrated to New York with his sister on the Majestic . There he became assistant director to Max Reinhardt . His work on the Jewish bible drama The Eternal Road by Franz Werfel and Kurt Weill led to a falling out with the latter.

Although Mendelssohn's siblings, whose father had left a fortune of about 34.5 million marks, had suffered considerable financial losses as a result of emigration, they supported other emigrants financially. Eleonora von Mendelssohn was able to take part of the art collection with her to Austria as removal goods and she had also managed to place the two supposed Rembrandts in Switzerland with Christoph Bernoulli , while she had only left copies of these works in the Mendelssohn Bank in Germany her grandfather had made. But because one of her cousins ​​feared reprisals if the rulers should notice the exchange of the pictures, he insisted in 1935 that the real pictures be brought back to Germany. In 1940 they were deposited with the Deutsche Staatsbank by Alfred Hentzen to prevent them from being sold abroad. At that time the owner was Giulietta von Mendelssohn. The latter was ultimately determined to sell the paintings, and assigned this task to their asset manager Aldo Cima , who had a large part of Mendelssohn's collection sold through the Austrian art dealer Otto Schatzker .

Francesco von Mendelssohn, who had previously been inclined to melancholy and longing for death, became extremely depressed in American exile and was also severely alcoholic from 1937 . Bernoulli described him as childish during this phase, stated that he was probably infected with syphilis beyond his other ailments and that he would completely collapse in society if he did not receive adequate therapy. Francesco von Mendelssohn was often admitted to psychiatric clinics and was repeatedly jailed for being intoxicated in accidents and fights.

Restitution claims

This portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels (before 1669) from the Mendelssohn Collection was considered a real Rembrandt at the time .

In 1946, his sister traveled alone to Europe to try to get the works back from Mendelssohn's art collection. After Aldo Cima's idea of ​​bribing the museum directors was rejected, she tried to achieve this goal partly through requests for refunds and partly through buybacks. The problem, however, turned out to be that Giulietta von Mendelssohn, the owner of the pictures, was considered an Aryan, so she could not prove any loss of the pictures due to persecution. The restitution applications were rejected in Germany in 1953, but Francesco von Mendelssohn's sister did not live to see it again. After her fourth husband, Martin Kosleck , fell out of the window and injured himself in January 1951 , and at about the same time Francesco von Mendelssohn suffered a stroke after a fight and arrest, she was found dead on January 24th. The evidence pointed to suicide.

Eleonora von Mendelssohn left considerable debts. Francesco von Mendelssohn tried again with Lillian D. Rock, his sister's executor, to get the pictures from Mendelssohn's collection back. He now claimed that his mother had given the pictures to his sister and him on New Year's Eve 1932, but could not achieve anything with them. Albert Einstein's advocacy was also ineffective. The portrait of Hendrikje, once attributed to Rembrandt, which was purchased for the Führermuseum in Linz , was handed over to the Munich trust administration by the American occupying forces in 1952. After Mendelssohn's request for return was rejected, it came to the Alte Pinakothek in Munich on loan from the Federal Republic of Germany and was transferred to the Städelsche Kunstinstitut in 1967 . Rembrandt's self-portrait in fur, with a necklace and earring , which was sold to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna via Schatzker , is still there. After a first rejection of Giulietta von Mendelssohn's application, Lillian D. Rock had apparently no longer engaged in this matter. In any case, no representative of the von Mendelssohn family appeared at the public hearing before the restitution commission at the Vienna Regional Court, whereupon the request was rejected.

Last years

At this point, Francesco von Mendelssohn was not able to turn himself on. After initially living in a psychiatric clinic in White Plains, where he may have had a lobotomy , he later came into the care of Lilly Wittels, the widow of psychiatrist Fritz Wittels . During a visit to Vienna in 1960, former friends experienced him as completely changed and indifferent. In his later years, he lost contact with previous friends. Few people attended his funeral.

Francesco von Mendelssohn bequeathed his Stradivari cello to a foundation and bequeathed some furniture and pictures as well as the remains of his fortune to friends and relatives. At the beginning of the 21st century, representatives of his heirs tried again to have the pictures from his family's collection returned.

literature

• Thomas Blubacher : "Is there anything better than longing?" The siblings Eleonora and Francesco von Mendelssohn. Henschel-Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-89487-623-4
• Thomas Blubacher: Eleonora and Francesco von Mendelssohn. 1900–1951 and 1901–1972 , in: Melissa Müller and Monika Tatzkow, Lost Pictures. Lives lost. Jewish collectors and what became of their works of art , Munich ²2009, licensed edition for the Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft Darmstadt, ISBN 978-3-534-23471-4 , pp. 72–85

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://www.taz.de/1/archiv/print-archiv/printressorts/digi-artikel/?ressort=ku&dig=2009%2F10%2F02%2Fa0165&cHash=edd3f55aa2
2. ↑ Georg Zivier: Romanisches Café , Berlin 1965, p. 78 f.
3. ↑ http://www.news.at/articles/0627/35/145017_s3/rembrandt-wien-auch-museen-werke-meisters