Lotte von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy

Lotte von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (born Charlotte Reichenheim on March 25, 1877 in Berlin; died as Countess von Wesdehlen on June 6, 1946 in Geneva) was a German author and art collector.

Life

Vincent van Gogh: Sunflowers, formerly part of the Lotte and Paul Mendelssohn-Bartholdy Collection, now Sompo Museum of Art, Tokyo

Henri Rousseau: Porträt des Herrn X (Pierre Loti), ehemals Sammlung Charlotte Gräfin von Wesdehlen, heute Kunsthaus Zürich

Charlotte Reichenheim, known as Lotte, was born in Berlin in 1877. Her parents were the entrepreneur Georg Reichenheim and his wife Margarete, née Eisner. Both parents came from Jewish families, but converted to the Evangelical Christian faith on the occasion of their wedding. Her brother Hans was born in 1879. He died as a student in Munich in 1900. The family lived in Berlin's upscale Tiergarten district. Lotte Reichenheim received private lessons there as a child and also spent several years of her childhood in Silesia. She came into contact with art at an early age in her parents' home. The parents primarily collected handicrafts and small sculptures. When building the collection, they were advised by the museum director Wilhelm Bode. In 1903 the father died and left his assets, estimated at 4,700,000 marks, to his wife and half to his daughter. The mother then dedicated herself to building an important art collection with works by French artists of Impressionism and late Impressionism, primarily purchasing paintings by Paul Cézanne. In 1906 she married the chemist and entrepreneur Franz Oppenheim for the second time.

Lotte Reichenheim had been married to the banker Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy since 1902. The marriage remained childless. The architect friend Bruno Paul converted Börnicke Castle near Bernau into a country residence for the couple and designed a city palace for them on Berlin's Alsenstrasse. Bruno Paul also designed the interior design of the houses and the modern furniture that was manufactured by the United Workshops. Bruno Paul was also co-founder and editor of the art and culture magazine Wieland, for which Lotte von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy worked as an editor from 1915. In this role she was responsible for acquiring articles and corresponded with authors such as Richard Dehmel, Wilhelm Bode and Max J. Friedländer. Her own essays appeared under her nickname Lotte v. Mendelssohn Bartholdy. These contributions “were undemanding, uncritical and primarily entertaining, pro-war and characterized by a tendentially conservative worldview,” as the author Anna-Carolin Augustin noted. She also wrote for the magazine Die Dame.

Together with her husband, Lotte von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy amassed an important art collection. From the surviving letters with Wilhelm Bode and with the art dealer Paul Rosenberg in Paris it is clear that both spouses were involved in building the collection.

Inspired by Bruno Paul and Wilhelm Uhde, Lotte and Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy were among the first in Germany to collect pictures by the painter Henri Rousseau. They also acquired works by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque before 1914, making them among the pioneers in this field. They were also among the early collectors of Vincent van Gogh's works in Germany. They acquired his pictures from Paul Cassirer in Berlin and from Heinrich Thannhauser in Munich, but also bought works by van Gogh from the Eugène Druet and Bernheim-Jeune galleries in Paris. Van Gogh's works in the collection included the paintings Mrs Roulin with her Child (now the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), Park in Arles (private collection), The Tree (private collection), Trees in the Garden of the Hospital Saint-Paul ( Armand Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles), The Man with the Cornflower (private collection), The Town Hall of Auvers on July 14th (private collection) and a version from the well-known series of Sunflowers (Sompo Museum of Art, Tokyo). A self-portrait in the collection that was formerly attributed to van Gogh is now considered a forgery (E. G. Bührle Collection Foundation, Zurich). In addition to Wilhelm Uhde, the gallerist Alfred Flechtheim played an important role as an advisor when acquiring Picasso's works. The series of Picasso paintings in the collection included Inclined Woman's Head (Staatsgalerie Stuttgart), Portrait of Angel Fernández de Soto (private collection), Le Moulin de la Galette and Fernande with Black Mantilla (both Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City), Boy leading a horse (Museum of Modern Art, New York City) and boy with a pipe (private collection). There were also works by other artists such as Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, André Derain, Marie Laurencin, Maurice de Vlaminck, William Hogarth and Paul Signac.

In addition to her literary work and the development of the joint art collection, Lotte von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy was active in Berlin's cultural life in a variety of ways. She was co-founder and chairwoman of the Women's Association for the Promotion of German Fine Art, which advocated the purchase of works of art by German artists in order to pass them on to museums. She was also a member of the German Society for East Asian Art. As a patron, she donated two Egyptian leather shadow puppets to the Islamic Department in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum (now the Museum of Islamic Art) in 1912.

Lotte und Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy divorced in1927.The couple divided up their art collection and Lotte von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy received high maintenance payments from her previous husband, so that she was financially independent. In 1930 she married Georg Graf von Wesdehlen (1869–1938), a retired captain, for the second time. D. from Prussian nobility. His grandfather was the diplomat Georges Frédéric Petitpierre. Her mother, Margarete Oppenheim, died in 1935 and left a complex will. Afterwards, the biological daughter Lotte, now Charlotte Countess of Wesdehlen, received an amount of 400,000 marks. At the same time, the mother decreed that the majority of the property should go to the children from Franz Oppenheim's first marriage. These step-siblings of Charlotte Countess von Wesdehlen were the entrepreneur Kurt Oppenheim and Martha von Simson, who had married the diplomat Ernst von Simson. TSome of her mother's art collection was auctioned off in 1936. Since outstanding paintings were not allowed to be exported abroad, some of the auction lots only achieved low prices or remained unsold. In 1938, paintings from her mother's collection were still owned by the family in Germany. At this point, both Charlotte Countess von Wesdehlen and her step-siblings were already living abroad. The Oppenheim property that remained in Germany was later confiscated by the German authorities.

In exile in Switzerland, Charlotte Countess von Wesdehlen lived in financial difficulties. Her parents' inheritance was no longer available to her and her first husband, who supported her financially, died in 1935. After the death of her second husband in 1938, she was increasingly forced to sell works of art from her own collection. The pictures that she was able to bring to Switzerland in time included, for example, the paintings La femme à la corbeille by Juan Gris, a rose still life by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and works by Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley. Sales include Renoir's Still Life with Peaches and Plums to the entrepreneur Emil Georg Bührle (now a private collection) and Henri Rousseau's The Muse that Inspires the Poet to the Kunstmuseum Basel. Before it was purchased, the Basel Rousseau was traded down from its estimated value of 20,000 francs to 12,000 francs, a “disgracefully cheap price,” according to museum director Georg Schmidt, who was aware of the collector's plight when purchasing it . In addition, the pictures Portrait of Mr. After difficult negotiations, Charlotte Countess von Wesdehlen received 11,000 Swiss francs for the painting by Picasso, which was described by the President of the Zurich Art Society Franz Meyer as a “very advantageous price”. He therefore recommended that the Kunsthaus committees “take advantage of this opportunity”. Both private buyers and museums benefited from the exiled collector's financial hardship. Charlotte Countess von Wesdehlen died in Geneva in 1946. .

Literature

• Anna-Carolin Augustin: Berliner Kunstmatronage: Sammlerinnen und Förderinnen bildender Kunst um 1900, Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2018, ISBN 978-3-8353-3180-8.
• Esther Tisa Francini, Anja Heuss, Georg Kreis: Fluchtgut - Raubgut : der Transfer von Kulturgütern in und über die Schweiz 1933 - 1945 und die Frage der Restitution. Herausgegeben von der Unabhängigen Expertenkommission Schweiz - Zweiter Weltkrieg, Chronos Verlag, Zürich 2001, ISBN 978-3-0340-0601-9.
• Anna-Dorothea Ludewig, Julius H. Schoeps, Indes Sonder (Hrsg.): Aufbruch in die Moderne: Sammler, Mäzene und Kunsthändler in Berlin 1880–1933. DuMont, Köln 2012, ISBN 978-3-8321-9428-4.

References

[[Category:Women]] [[Category:1946 deaths]] [[Category:1877 births]] [[Category:German people]] [[Category:Art collectors]] [[Category:Emigrants from Nazi Germany]]