Francesco von Mendelssohn

Francesco von Mendelssohn (born Franz von Mendelssohn; 6 September 1901 – 22 September 1972) was a German cellist and art collector. He also became known during the 1920s as a stage actor and theater director. He acquired additional notability with a lifestyle that some found eccentric.

Biography Family provenance and early years He was born in Berlin. His great-great-great-grandfather, the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), had become the ancestor of a prominent dynasty of bankers and musicians, notably Felix Mendelssohn and his sister Fanny Mendelssohn, who were thereby Franz's first cousins three times removed (generationally).

Franz von Mendelssohn, who later Italianised his first name, was the son of the banker and his young wife Giulietta Gordigiani. She was a daughter of the fashionable Florentine portraitist Michele Gordigiani. After her husband died in 1917 and her daughter married pianist Edwin Fischer, she moved to Italy with her daughter Angelica von Mendelssohn. In 1923 she met the cellist Gaspar Cassadó, who was 26 years younger than she was, with whom she lived for more than 30 years. Francesco stayed in the large family home at Königsallee 16 in Berlin's Grunewald quarter, The house contained numerous antiquities and, most notably, the large art collection that Robert von Mendelssohn had built up. This included works by Guardi, Goya and Rubens. There were also two paintings attributed at that time to Rembrandt: a self-portrait and a portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels (after Mendelssohn's death re-attributed to the "school of Rembrandt" and with doubts about its attribution ). From 1910 Robert von Mendelssohn had aggressively and presciently expanded the collection, selecting works by Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, Max Slevogt, Édouard Manet and Claude Monet.

Francesco showed a similarly sure touch in his selection, buying works by Toulouse-Lautrec, Segantini and Camille Corot. His greater love was for music and the theatre, however. As a pupil of Pablo Casals and Arthur Williams he became a professional cellist. He became a solo performer, and was also, at different rimes, a member of the Busch quartet and of the Klingler quartet.

He also wrote a book about Eleonora Duse, who was a friend of his mother's and his sister's God mother. He translated the plays of Luigi Pirandello from Italian, at the same time working as a movie actor and as a theatre director. Co-stars included Lotte Lenya, Peter Lorre, Fritz Kortner, Theo Lingen, Heinz Rühmann and Paul Hörbiger.

Among social commentators Francesco von Mendelssohn became known as an eccentric. He drove a white Lancia cabriolet in which the seat covers were made of ermine, With his friend Ruth Landshoff he liked to turn up wearing an evening dress, while she, as his partner, wore his suit.

Emigration The Mendelssohns were baptised as Christians but, as racist sentiment increased in Germany, they were widely perceived as Jewish. After the Nazis came to power in January 1933, the Mendelssohns were persecuted as Jews. It became apparent that the antisemitism of the Nazi Party in opposition was no mere empty threat, even though a Christian baptism might be regarded by some as sufficient protection against the rising threat of state persecution. The von Mendelssohn siblings emigrated. While Eleonora, who at this point was married to an Austrian, moved back to , in Upper Austria, and not far from Salzburg. Francesco von Mendelssohn stayed away from German speaking central Europe, spending most of the time between 1933 and 1935 in Paris. He also took the opportunity to extend and deepen his contacts in the United States. Initially he lived in hotels in New York. Later he acquired a house in 83rd Street where he resumed his habit of throwing lavish parties for members of the artistic elite. He moved briefly to Hollywood, but by 1937 was back in New York.

The massive fortune that the von Mendelssohn siblings had inherited from their banker father was greatly diminished by the anti-semitic measures imposed by Nazis that accompanied in their emigration, but they remained wealthy by most standards and were able to provide financial support to other refugees.

Eleonora von Mendelssohn left substantial debts. Francesco von Mendelssohn, with help from his sister's executrix, Lillian D. Rock, made another attempt to recover the pictures from he Mendelssohn collection. He now asserted that their mother had gifted the pictures to Eleonora and himself on New Year's Eve in 1932. Albert Einstein, by now an international celebrity, spoke out in support of Mendelssohn's claim. But the authorities were unmoved. The portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels attributed to Rembrandt, which had been purchased for the "Fuhrer Museum" in Linz, was handed over by the US occupying forces to the Munich-based Treuhandverwaltung (public trusteeship administration). After Mendelssohn's claim for restitution had been rejected it was loaned by the West German government to the Alte Pinakothek art gallery in Munich and then, in 1967, transferred to the Städel institute in Frankfurt. The 1652 Rembrandt Self-portrait in a fur coat with gold chain and earring had been sold through Schatzker to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna: it is still there.

After the first rejection of the case based on Francesco von Mendelssohn's belated recollection concerning the alleged transfer of ownership from their mother to her children back in 1932, Lillian Rock, his sister's executrix withdrew from the case. Later, at a public hearing on the matter held before the district court in Vienna, no one turned up to represent the Mendelssohn family's position, and their application was again rejected.

Final years Francesco von Mendelssohn had been in no position to appear at that hearing on his own behalf. He spent a period as an inmate at a psychiatric clinic in White Plains, New York. There are contemporary reports that he may have undergone a lobotomy, possibly in order to protect him from the further clutches of the justice system.