Demise of Bank, Dispersal of Art Collection
The entire Mendelssohn firm was forcibly liquidated by the Nazis later that same year—its assets were transferred to Deutsche Bank—and much of Mannheimer's art was purchased by Adolf Hitler in 1941, after the German invasion of the Netherlands. Other works from the collections were stored in England and Vichy, France, by Mannheimer's widow until the end of the war.
The lion's share of Mannheimer's collection was acquired by the Rijksmuseum in 1952, when it was repatriated from Germany; the museum was forced to sell half of the collection by the order of the Dutch Ministry of Finance. Coincidentally, Mannheimer's Amsterdam residence now is used for some of the Rijksmuseum's offices. The Metropolitan Museum of Art owns one of the masterpieces of Mannheimer's collection, "Young Man Blowing Bubbles" (a.k.a. "Soap Bubbles"), a circa-1734 painting by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin; it was sold in 1949 to the museum by Wildenstein & Co., the art dealers, who had acquired the painting after it was repatriated to France in 1946.
Read more about this topic: Fritz Mannheimer
Famous quotes containing the words art and/or collection:
“But the nature of our civilized minds is so detached from the senses, even in the vulgar, by abstractions corresponding to all the abstract terms our languages abound in, and so refined by the art of writing, and as it were spiritualized by the use of numbers, because even the vulgar know how to count and reckon, that it is naturally beyond our power to form the vast image of this mistress called “Sympathetic Nature.””
—Giambattista Vico (1688–1744)
“It’s rather grisly, isnt it, how soon a living man becomes nothing more than a collection of stocks and bonds and debts and real estate?”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)