Rolled Canvases Across Borders: The Collection of Marianne de Goldschmidt-Rothschild

Graf Harry Kessler’s diary mentions a dinner in 1929 at an art collector’s house on Pariser Platz in Berlin: “Eight to ten people, intimate party, extreme luxury… Four priceless masterpieces by Manet, Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Monet respectively on the walls.” This collector, born Marie-Anne von Friedlander-Füld, was known as Marianne de Goldschmidt-Rothschild by then. She also owned paintings by Renoir, Lautrec, Gauguin, Cézanne, Picasso, Rousseau, and others. When she first married the Hon. John Freeman-Mitford in 1914 in Berlin, the international press called her “Germany’s wealthiest heiress,” and “the $30,000,000 heiress.” Yet the collection was her own: In her correspondence with Rainer Maria Rilke during WWI, she mentioned her painting by Van Gogh, L’Arlésienne (Musée d’Orsay), which she acquired when she was barely 22, against her father’s wishes. After her divorce from her third husband, Baron Rudolph von Goldschmidt-Rothschild, in 1926, she kept the name and moved to Paris, until the Nazi threat forced her into exile in the US. Soon after the declaration of war, in October 1939 she entrusted three paintings to the Direction des Musées nationaux de France, to be hidden together with the artworks of the Louvre. She hoped to ship these paintings to New York through a reputed art dealer. When this failed to occur on her own terms, she decided to transport all her paintings to New York herself. Against all odds, in May 1940, she transported her paintings on the roof of her car from Paris to Lisbon, from where she was eventually able to embark on the cargo ship Quanza, bound for Veracruz, with roughly fifteen rolled-up canvases and her two teenaged children. They reached New York via Texas five months later. In this case study, I reconstruct the contents of this little-known but major collection, and the unusual manner in which it was brought to the USA for the duration of the war, exemplifying the notion of canvases as movable assets, as well as symbols of the collectors’ values, beliefs and identity.