Person Sheet

Name Lilly DISPECKER 295,7 Birth 19 Jan 1876296 Death 1962297 Father ? DISPECKER
Spouses
1 Friedrich (Fritz) Leopold CASSIRER  Birth 29 Mar 1871, Breslau, Silesia (now Wroclaw, Poland)160 Death 26 Nov 1926, Berlin, Germany160 Occupation Music scholar, conductor Father Julius CASSIRER (1841-1924) Mother Julcher (Julie) CASSIRER (1844-1924)
Children Eva Charlotte (1901-1921)
2 Husband-1
3 Professor Otto NEUBAUER 297 Birth 1874399 Death 1957 Occupation biomedical scientist:
Notes for Lilly DISPECKER
According to one report, Lilly was a distant cousin of Fritz and herself a Cassirer. See "American Says Painting in Spain Is Holocaust Loot" by Emma Daly - http://www.museum-security.org/03/016.html David Highland Cassirer reports that Lilly Cassirer Neubauer was his great grandmother and Claude's grandmother, and she raised Claude when his mother died when he was an infant. Claude Cassirer is the only child of her only child, and he is her heir with respect to the stolen Pissarro. Lilly's first husband Friedrich (Fritz), was the conductor of the Comic Light Opera in Berlin, and conducted throughout Europe, at Covant Garden (sp?), etc. If memory serves, Julius acquired the Pissarro directly from the artist via Durand Ruel (I think that's right, but don't quote me), the artist's representative, shortly after it was created, just before the turn of the century in 1900. Lilly and Claude were naturally very close. David was on the Queen Mary from NY to Southhampton to visit Lilly and Otto in Oxford with his parents when he was little. After Otto died, Lilly came to live with them in Cleveland, Ohio until her death in the 1950s. Lilly was, as a younger woman, beautiful, and interesting, and married two very prominent and extraordinary men. After Fritz died, she married Otto, who I believe was her physician, and a longtime family friend. He was probably the most extraordinary man any of us have every known. Claude has a beautiful oil of Otto, a large framed piece, at the house in San Diego. Lilly and Otto bought their freedom from Nazi Germany in 1939 by giving up Pissarro's "Rue St. Honore," oil on canvas @ 1897, in exchange, more or less, for exit visas. The painting hangs currently in the Thyssen, and I believe we've discussed this via email previously. Lilly retained a "provenance photo" showing the painting hanging in Lilly's parlor in Munich before the war. It's quite an interesting item, and the kind of thing Holocaust families typically don't have to prove their earlier ownership of art works, as so much in the way of photos, documents ,etc. was lost in WWII. Lilly had everything like this because she and Otto escaped Germany in 1939 before the war broke out.