Picasso's Madame Soler: a 1935 sale, still disputed

In August 1935, at his gallery in Berlin, the dealer Justin K. Thannhauser listed a Picasso portrait as “purchased”, DW reports from the gallery’s internal records. The painting was Madame Soler, from 1903. Its previous owner, Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, a Jewish banker and collector in Berlin, had died of a heart attack on 11 May 1935. Whether he sold it freely is still unresolved.

Picasso painted the portrait in his Blue Period. It shows the wife of Benet Soler, a tailor and a friend of the artist. Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and his first wife built a large collection of modern art. It also reports, citing the heirs’ historian Julius H. Schoeps, that he sold 15 paintings between 1933 and 1935 and none before.

The two sides read the sale differently. The heirs say it was a forced transfer: they claim he consigned the painting to Thannhauser in 1934, after two years of Nazi persecution had ruined him financially. They add that apart from the gallery’s internal records there is no direct evidence of a purchase, and that it may have been a commission sale or no sale at all. Bavaria says he sold it between July 1934 and August 1935. It holds that this was a documented sale, not a persecution-related seizure under the Washington Principles on Nazi-confiscated art, so not a restitution case.

Thannhauser, a Jewish dealer, left Germany for Paris and fled to the United States in 1940. The painting then hung in his private collection in New York. In a letter of 3 August 1964, quoted by a US court, he confirmed the sale to the Bavarian State Painting Collections, “as commission agent”, for 1,775,000 Swiss francs. It was shipped from Vaduz, Liechtenstein, and paid for there. Thannhauser died in 1976 and was never charged. Nobody in this story is accused of a crime.

The heirs first made a claim in 2009. Bavaria rejected it in 2010 and says outside experts agreed in 2010 and 2013. In March 2013, Schoeps and two other heirs sued in New York. On 27 June 2014 Judge Jed S. Rakoff dismissed the case for lack of jurisdiction under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. The Second Circuit upheld that in May 2015, and Bavaria says the Supreme Court refused the case in early 2016. No court decided whether the sale was persecution-related.

Germany’s Advisory Commission, set up in 2003, could act only if both sides agreed. Bavaria would not. In June 2021 the commission’s chair, Hans-Jürgen Papier, called that refusal “inexplicable”, the New York Times reported. On 30 March 2023 the museum took the painting off display, “ostensibly for curatorial reasons”, The Art Newspaper wrote. In 2024 the Bavarian arts minister, Markus Blume, proposed arbitration. On 29 November 2025 tagesschau reported that Bavaria was ready to go to arbitration. Critics, the lawyer Olaf Ossmann and the historian Willi Korte, say the new rules suit Bavaria, because heirs must show a persecution-related sale when a work was sold abroad. The commission ended on 30 November 2025. The Arbitration Tribunal for Nazi-looted property began on 1 December 2025, and heirs can apply on their own. The sources used here do not report an application.

The museum’s record, updated on 2 July 2026, says the painting is not on display. On 15 July 2026 taz wrote that Bavaria had refused the heirs a return and a decision by an independent state body, and that the case was still not decided. On 4 September 2026 the FAZ still called Madame Soler disputed between Bavaria and the heirs.