The Van Gogh Wars | Part 1: $750 Million Asked From Paul Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s Family For Sunflower Painting Sold Forcefully Under Nazism

In a 98-page document for Schoeps et al v. Sompo Holdings, Inc. et al filed December 13th, the heirs of Berlin banker Paul Mendelssohn-Bartholdy ask for $750 million in punitive damages from the Japanese-based company Sompo regarding the ownership of Sunflowers from 1889 (deemed to be three times its current value). Sompo’s business dealings in the United States have prompted the heirs to file the case in Illinois.

It is important to note that this is just one of a series of lawsuits pursued by the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy heirs regarding the lost collection. In 2020, they won back a drawing by Pablo Picasso from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, one of five works by the artist once housed at Alsenstrasse. Another, The Absinthe Drinker, was settled with the Andrew Lloyd-Webber Foundation, with an additional £35 million donated to underprivileged children.

Julius H. Schoeps, Britt-Marie Enhoerning, and Florence Von Kesselstatt are descendants of both Paul Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and his wife Elsa with her subsequent husband. Schoeps is Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s great-nephew, a founder of the University of Potsdam, where he is the director of European-Jewish Studies and a professor emeritus, residing in Berlin. Enhoerning, his grand-niece, is a resident of New York and Sweden, and Florence von Kesselstatt is Elsa’s daughter.

The following information was largely provided by the legal documents, which appear to be filed by Representative John Rotunno. Rotunno did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

At the dawn of 1933, Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy seemed to have it all. He was the majority stakeholder of the Berlin-based Mendelssohn & Co., one of the largest banks in Germany at the time. It was among five, comparable today to a Citigroup or a J.P. Morgan Chase. He was on the board of the Berlin Stock Exchange and the Reich Insurance Corporation, even providing a space for the Danish consul in his private residence, Alsenstrasse, where he had lived since 1918.

Alsenstrasse was elaborately renovated by a renowned architect, in part to house his impressive art collection begun during the same period. In 1927, he married a non-Jewish second wife 20 years his junior named Elsa, and appeared to be intrinsically integrated into the upper echelons of Berlin society.

But starting in November 1933, the imminent threat of Nazism began reducing him to nothing more than a Jew. According to his descendants’ lawsuit, Mendelssohn & Co. became a “Jewish-owned” bank; Mendelsohn-Bartholdy was forced to stop attending all board meetings, and the company ultimately dissolved into Deutsche Bank (despite employee attempts at negotiation) by 1938. Jewish board members were forced to resign and Jewish employees were fired. Shareholders received no compensation. 345 so-called “Jewish private banks” were completely liquidated by 1939.

Amidst Nazi pressure on the bank, any asset was now a liability with diminishing returns: The lawsuit calculates that the banker’s earnings declined 78 percent from 1931 to 1934.

By then, Mendelssohn-Bartholdy was already scrambling to retain safety. He moved from the prominent Alsenstrasse home to a rented garden house in Schlosspark Bellvue, and had no choice but to sell off his art collection. He was running out of money, and he certainly no longer had the opportunity to store it.

Because his wife Elsa was not Jewish, the astute banker was rapidly transferring property and valuables into her name. Mendelssohn-Bartholdy purchased a small Bavarian farmhouse with a high mortgage to reflect a loss for Elsa, and in February 1935, a Contract of Inheritance bequeathed his art to her and her descendants as a retroactive ‘wedding gift’, thus removing it from his own taxable assets.

During the preceding approximately 25 years, Mendelssohn-Bartholdy collected an astounding array of contemporary and historical European works of art. Some was deemed “Degenerate Art”, a label created by the Nazis for Abstract Expressionism that did not fit their mold. Most notable among them were seven paintings by Vincent van Gogh: Trunk of an Old Yew Tree (1888), The Public Park (1888), St. Paul’s Hospital (Hospital at St. Remy) (1889), The Town Hall at Auvers (1890), Young Man with Cornflower (1890), and a self-portrait whose authenticity was subsequently disputed. But most celebrated of all is now Sunflowers, from 1889.

By 1935, Mendelssohn-Bartholdy had consigned 16 valuable paintings (including Sunflowers) to Jewish art dealer Paul Rosenberg, based out of Paris, reducing the value of his art by half. Despite a relationship dating back to 1913, Mendelssohn-Bartholdy had never sold a painting back through Rosenberg before the onset of war. Legal documents assert that this demonstrates just how desperate the art collector really was—fighting not just for his wealth, but possibly for his life.

Mendelssohn-Bartholdy died in May 10, 1935—not in a death camp, but of what the 2007 New York Times later called “a weak heart”. In a way, there is a sad poetic justice in this untimely fate. His body gave out in a battle he could not win.

The works sold to Rosenberg were sold in what his descendants’ lawyers called a “forced sale,” reemerging in 1990 at Christie’s auction house.