Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne has removed a disputed Picasso portrait after an intervention by Germany’s culture minister, who said a resolution to the dispute was “really overdue”.
Ms Soler, a 1903 expressionist portrait of a tailor friend’s wife painted during Picasso’s Blue Period, belonged to collector Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. He transferred the work, along with other pieces, to art dealer Justin Thannhauser across the Swiss border in the early 1930s amid growing anti-Semitism.
The piece was later sold to Bavaria in 1964 and has since been on display at the southern German state museum of modern art, the Pinakothek der Moderne. The museum denied it was a case of looted art, saying the sale to Thannhauser was legitimate despite claims by historian Julius Schoeps, a descendant of Mendelssohn-Bartholdy who wrote a book about of 200 pages titled Who owns “Madame Soler” by Picasso? How the Free State of Bavaria handled a spectacular Nazi-looted art deal.
The museum’s position could contradict the 1998 Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, of which the Federal Republic of Germany was a co-signatory. Fifty years after Picasso’s death, the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper called the museum’s intransigence “scandalous” and that the representative expressionist work “became something like the poster boy for a new era in German art history in the present day. […] finally dealing with the manner in which, decades after the end of German fascism, the heirs of Jewish collectors can be given back what was stolen, extorted or confiscated from them.
Other works by Picasso previously owned by Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Boy driving a horse And The Moulin de la Galettewere the subject of a settlement between his descendants and the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Culture Minister Claudia Roth told the Bavarian newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung: “I expressly call on the Bavarian state government to finally pave the way for the Bavarian state painting collections to agree to appeal to the advisory commission. It is really too late now”, making referring to the adoption of a new restitution law. The painting has now been removed from public display, apparently for conservation reasons.
