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/-------------------- advertisement -----------------------\ Enjoy new investment freedom! Get the tools you need to successfully manage your portfolio from Harrisdirect. Start with award-winning research. Then add access to round-the-clock customer service from Series-7 trained representatives. Open an account today and receive a $100 credit! http://www.nytimes.com/ads/Harrisdirect.html \----------------------------------------------------------/ Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza, Fabled Art Collector, Dies at 81 April 28, 2002 By JONATHAN KANDELL Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, the Swiss industrial magnate who used his fabulous art collection to court fame and controversy, died yesterday in Spain. He was 81. Baron Thyssen suffered a heart attack early yesterday morning, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid reported. In both business and art, Baron Thyssen built upon his enormous inheritance. He diversified his father's war-shattered company, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Group (pronounced TEESS-an Bor-nuh-MEES-uh), into glass, plastics, automobile parts, trading and container leasing. >From its profits, the baron also expanded his father's collection into a private art holding rivaled only by the collection of the queen of England. The paintings - more than 1,000 old and modern masters - as well as sculptures and tapestries were stashed away in the galleries and vaults of the baron's villa on Lake Lugano in Switzerland. Then, after years of public haggling with several countries, Baron Thyssen sold the bulk of his treasures to Spain, the native land of his fifth wife, Carmen (Tita) Cervera. The artworks are on permanent display in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum and also in a restored medieval monastery on the outskirts of Barcelona. In the end, Spain got the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection for a bargain: the $350-million price tag was a fraction of its $2-billion estimated value, according to Sotheby's, the auction firm. But the cloak-and-dagger maneuvers, protracted negotiations and raucous public debate that preceded the closing of the deal made the baron a target of heated criticism. "This wasn't any act of generosity," fumed a leading Spanish newspaper columnist, Francisco Umbral. "It's just a crude business deal." Baron Thyssen reveled in such controversies. Never just a high-minded cultural patron, he approached art philanthropy with the same tenacity he applied to the business world. He first gave the impression that he might freely donate his collection to Spain, and got the government to build the facilities to house the artworks. Then he persuaded the Spanish authorities to pay him $5 million a year to rent the collection while its final disposition was negotiated. "If I'm happy here and everything works out well, the arrangement will become permanent," he said in an interview at his Madrid villa. These tactics, however, left some in the art world dumbfounded. The art critic Robert Hughes denounced the baron's teasing maneuvers as a "dance of the seven veils." Perhaps it was in the baron's nature to appear elusive. Heini - as he was called by the people closest to him - was Dutch by birth, Swiss by citizenship and officially a resident of Monaco for tax reasons. Britain was his declared secondary residence, though he spent the last years of his life mainly in Spain. To further confuse matters, the origin of his fortune was German and his title was Hungarian. The fortune was only three generations old and the title even more recent. His grandfather, August Thyssen, of Rhineland peasant stock, built a chicken-wire business into a steel and armaments empire. Of his seven children, the most formidable were the oldest, Fritz, who inherited leadership of the family industries, and the third son, Heinrich, who was Heini's father. Fritz Thyssen was one of Hitler's earliest and most ardent supporters, helping finance the Nazis' Beer-Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923. Though he broke with the Nazis during World War II and was interned in a concentration camp, his earlier notoriety led the Allies to jail him for several more years after the war. Heini's father, Heinrich Thyssen, avoided similar misfortune and dishonor by abandoning Germany as a young man and settling in Hungary in 1905. In Budapest, Heinrich married the daughter of the king's chamberlain, who, having no sons of his own, adopted Heinrich and passed on his barony to him. To accommodate the noble title, Heinrich added his father-in-law's last name, becoming Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza. In Hungarian, Bornemisza means "doesn't drink wine." "I should have changed it to Wiznemisza - `doesn't drink water,' " joked Heini, who never hid his penchant for liquor. The first Baron Thyssen eventually moved to Holland, where Heini was born on April 13, 1921. With the death of the patriarch August Thyssen in 1924, the family fortune was divided among his children. Heinrich used his mighty inheritance to become a banker and shipping magnate in the Netherlands, and he invested much of his earnings in art, mainly old masters. With the outbreak of World War II, Heinrich Thyssen settled permanently in Lugano, Switzerland, where he already had made a private museum for his art collection in an 18th-century mansion, called Villa Favorita. Young Heini grew up surrounded by these treasures. Reversing the usual art flow across the Atlantic, the first Baron Thyssen purchased some of his finest paintings from American millionaires whose fortunes were battered by the Depression and inheritance taxes. He bought Carpaccio's "Young Knight in a Landscape" from the widow of Otto Kahn and Ghirlandaio's "Portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni" from the J. P. Morgan collection. These were his favorite paintings, and hang in the Madrid museum. The collection represented every great European master from Titian, Holbein, Carpaccio, Caravaggio, van Eyck, Hans Memling and El Greco to Rubens, Vel�zquez, Rembrandt, Canaletto and Goya. In his waning years, the first Baron Thyssen turned Villa Favorita into a foundation, making Heini the president and guardian of more than 400-plus paintings, along with numerous sculptures, ceramics and tapestries. But when their father died in 1947, Heini's three siblings successfully sued for shares of the collection. Half remained in Villa Favorita, and the new baron devoted much of the next 15 years to buying back the rest. Heini was slow to emerge from his father's shadow as a collector in his own right. When he did strike out on his own, Heini first expanded his father's old masters collection - which was strongest in northern European paintings - with works by French, Spanish and Italian artists. It was not until the early 1960's that he began to buy more recent works. "My father had drummed into me that modern art - for him, anything after the 18th century - was rubbish," the baron said. "And while he was alive, he prevented me from buying it." Heini began his modern acquisitions with German Expressionists like Kirchner, Nolde, Grosz and Heckel, who had been suppressed by the Nazis. "I was drawn to them politically, even before I appreciated them aesthetically," he said. Then he acquired Impressionists, the Russian avant-garde, French Cubists, and Italian Futurists. Beginning in 1979, he purchased 19th-century and pre-World War II American paintings. "He became very, very eclectic in his tastes," said his former curator, Simon de Pury. "He is somebody capable of buying a Jackson Pollock today, a medieval ivory tomorrow and an old master the next day." Among the Impressionists he collected were Renoir, Monet, Degas, Manet, van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, C�zanne and Gauguin. Particularly rare for a European collection were paintings by 18th- and 19th-century American artists like Copley, Charles Willson Peale, Homer and Sargent. And he purchased work by such 20th-century artists as Kandinsky, Munch, Mondrian, Braque, Picasso, Chagall, Hopper, Pollock, Andrew Wyeth, Hockney and Lichtenstein. As the baron's collection grew, so too did its audience. He opened Villa Favorita's galleries to the public and, beginning in the 1970's, staged dozens of exhibitions from his artworks in museums around the world. The wide exposure built up enormous interest in the collection. So, when the Swiss authorities declined to pay for an expansion of the Villa Favorita in 1986, the baron began his search for another nation worthy of his art trove. Soon, from all over the world - from Disney World to the British government - various emissaries and supplicants showed up at his doorstep. But Thyssen-watchers felt that Spain had the inside track because the baron supposedly wished to please his wife, Tita Cervera. Before meeting her, he had four other wives - German, English, Scottish and Brazilian. Each divorce had been more costly and bitter than the last, and had made the baron a fixture in gossip columns around the world. Tita Cervera, who had been crowned Miss Spain in 1962, had gone through two marriages herself, and had a child out of wedlock. She appeared eager to make a triumphal return to her native country, and sometimes left the impression that she was instrumental in persuading her husband to turn over his collection to Spain. In fact, the baron had other solid reasons to choose Spain over other suitors for his artworks. The Spanish government agreed to refurbish the 19th-century Villahermosa Palace, a stone's throw from the Prado Museum. Renamed the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, it would house most of the 830 works of art the baron brought to Spain. The rest would hang in a 14th-century monastery that was renovated in Barcelona. The announcement that most of the famed Thyssen-Bornemisza collection would go to Spain was made in 1988. But it wasn't until five years later that the $350-million deal was completed. Spain's press, which had fawned over the deal when it was first thought the works would be a free donation, turned nasty upon learning that the art would have to be paid for. The baron seemed impervious. "I suppose it's fortunate I don't read Spanish," he said in 1992. His predictions that Spaniards would eventually demonstrate their gratitude were soon borne out. In recent years, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum has become a major attraction for Spanish art-lovers and foreign tourists in Madrid. Besides his widow, the baron is survived by three sons and a daughter from his first four marriages: Georg Heinrich, Lorne and Wilfred Alexander, and Francesca, who is married to Karl von Habsburg, scion of the ruling house of Austria. He adopted Tita's son, Borja, whose father she never disclosed, after his last marriage. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/28/obituaries/28THYS.html?ex=1020965126&ei=1&en=42e8d8fc2b4b79fa HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! 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