The last time I visited Coventry was as a witness in the trial of a man with a tattoo on his neck who had strangled his girlfriend in a fit of jealous rage. Murders are generally sordid, but in my experience as a witness in murder trials, those in Coventry are particularly so.

As for the city itself, it should be declared a unesco World Heritage Site of British post-war architectural and city-planning incompetence: it is almost laughably awful. Immediately after the war, perhaps, there was some slight excuse for this aesthetic monstrousness: the city had to be rebuilt quickly after the bombing that destroyed much or most of its ancient fabric. But the more money that was spent on it, the worse it got: you can give a modern British architect money, but you can’t get him to design anything other than an eyesore.

The five finalists this year were all “collectives,” as if suddenly such “collectives” had produced work that was better in quality than that of any mere individual.

It was only appropriate, therefore, that the exhibition of this year’s Turner Prize, Britain’s most important, or at any rate most highly publicized, annual prize for the visual arts should have been held in Coventry.1 Why, indeed, should London host all the worst rubbish? Not for nothing does the page for the prize on the Tate’s website say only that it is awarded for “an outstanding exhibition or other presentation”—outstanding being a weasel word typical of the art establishment and bureaucracy that precludes practically nothing and indeed is an incitement to bizarrerie.

The five finalists this year were all “collectives,” as if suddenly such “collectives” had produced work that was better in quality than that of any mere individual. One felt almost back in the days of the Cultural Revolution, when the hospital cleaners supposedly knew better than the professor of surgery how to remove a huge abdominal tumor.

For those hoping for an occasion for lamentation or outrage, the Turner Prize exhibition did not disappoint. As one has now come to expect at such exhibitions, one is greeted at the entrance by a cacophony, mostly but not entirely of women with flat voices intoning the platitudes of their current orthodoxy or accounts of past injustice. Contemplation in silence is one of the casualties of publicly funded art or, more accurately, the malversation of funds for para-artistic activity. Throughout the exhibition, I could not help but recall the late Professor Michael Shepherd’s short review of a book titled Annual Progress in Psychiatry. It should have been titled, he wrote, Annual Activity in Psychiatry.

One enters a kind of kindergarten of the indoctrinated, by the indoctrinated, for the indoctrinated. Each of the five galleries is devoted to the work, or the activity, of one of the collectives. Each is provided with a brief summary, which by itself is sufficient to induce a state of boredom. It takes talent of a kind to be both brief and tedious:

Cooking Sections address the environmental impact of intensive food production. . . . Their work uses food as a lens to observe landscapes in transformation, and as a tool for intervention in those very systems of food production and supply. Using site-responsive installation, performances and film, they explore the overlapping boundaries between art, architecture, ecology and geopolitics.

Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S.)was established in 2018 to bring together a community of queer, trans and non-binary black people and people of colour involved in art, sound and radical activism. Following the legacies of sound system culture they wanted to learn, build and sustain a resource for collective struggles. [Incidentally, this may be a sly reference to the acronym of the Bureau of State Security—boss—under the apartheid regime in South Africa. One can’t be sure, though: such is the state of educational presentism that even 1990 now seems in the realm of prehistory.]

Array Collective are a collective of artists rooted in Belfast. They create collaborative actions in response to social issues—for example around language, gender and reproductive rights—affecting themselves, their communities and allies. Arrayreclaim and question traditional identities associated with Northern Ireland in playful ways that merge performance, protest, ancient mythology, photography, installation and video. . . . Arrayinvite us into a place of contradictions where trauma, dark humour, frustration and release coexist.

Gentle/Radicalwas established in 2017 as a collaborative cultural project based in Cardiff’s Riverside neighbourhood. It composes [sic]community activists, conflict resolution trainers, faith ministers, equalities practitioners, youth workers, land workers, writers and artists. They organise community film screenings, grassroots symposia, performative works, talks and gatherings that bring people together. Their aim is to rethink how we live with each other in more equitable ways.

Description of their “work” is not easy. Array Collective, for example, reproduced the inside of a pub in Northern Ireland, which could have served as a set for an episode in a soap opera. On the wall of the pub—alas all too realistically—was a large flat-screen television relaying the performance of an Irish comedian: “In what are called the Dark Ages,” he said, “the Christians came to fight the fairies, to save us from sodomy. The Christians were defeated.”

This double entendre—on the one hand what the Irish called “the little people” and on the other a formerly popular slang term for homosexuals (for the use of which you might be arrested nowadays in England)—caused hoots of laughter by what sounded like the comedian’s juvenile audience. There were five late-middle-aged women in the gallery—a party, I should imagine—who watched with that peculiar solemnity reserved for the perusal of great art; they probably believed that they were improving themselves in the way that art is sometimes thought to encourage.

In the gallery in which the “work” of Gentle/Radicalwas displayed, there was a huge liquid-crystal screen showing members of the collective rocking gently while intoning a chant called “All Singing Together.” What did their activity mean to members of the collective? After reading their explanation, I felt slightly sick:

Anushiyesays you cannot have a syllabus of light without a syllabus of darkness; Mary-Anne seeks the whereabouts of the village; Tomtells us the work, underneath it all, is about recovery; Rachelnegotiates a balancing act around the un-productivity of grief; Rosannais drilling down, into layers of care; Tonyis seeking different formulations for community; Adeolais slowing down the body, in moments of absent and present freedoms; Isabelwants to dismantle the power inherent in her parenting; Stephenis seeking a consistent labour of the spirit; Rababis wishing to alchemise the wounds; Ahmadis holding fast to imagination and steady bridges; Samsonis exploring the rewriting of homeland; Divyaforges new meanings for familial bonds; and Laurais centring moments of prayer.

I need hardly point out that all the care, recovery, alchemizing of the wounds, etc., in the above, strongly resembles the pain as described by Mrs. Gradgrind: “I think there is a pain somewhere in the room, but I couldn’t positively say that I have got it.” Members of Gentle/Collectivehave mastered the art of using words to include nothing and exclude nothing. They have the connotation of wind chimes, the healing chakras of the earth, and infusions of verbena or valerian.

The only one of the five collectives that produced anything resembling art as commonly understood since the dawn of civilization (the indifference of the judges of the Turner Prize to which suggests that we are now approaching the dusk of civilization) was called Project Art Works. This is an initiative to encourage what are now called the “neurodivergent”(a word that has apparently entered common usage, since my word-processing program does not underline it in red as being unknown), that is to say the mentally handicapped in some way. Anyone familiar with what is called “outsider” artwill recognize the type of work produced by Project Art Works: work that is often considerably more interesting, beautiful, or moving than anything produced by those whom I suppose I must, in logic, call the “neuroconvergent”(a word not recognized by my word-processing program—no doubt only as yet), at least if the selection of the judges of the Turner Prize were anything to go by.

The problem with the collectives is that they have only their ideas to inspire or guide them.

A project to encourage the mentally handicapped (that is to say, handicapped in one way or another) to draw and paint is socially laudable, a worthy aim: I doubt that many could be found who would disagree. One would not necessarily expect great art to result, even when what is produced is interesting or beautiful, but the important question naturally arises as to why the only work of any aesthetic or artistic value whatever in a prize exhibition to reward the best art produced in the country should have been done by the mentally handicapped. Everything else, indeed, added to the already superabundant ugliness of the man-made world about us.

I think an answer can be given to this question. If we take, for example, the drawings of a man called Neville Jermyn, about whom there was no further information provided, perhaps on the principle that no interest in his individuality should be expressed to set him apart from other members of the collective, something is obvious: namely that they are an immediate and sincere response to the beauty of the world as instantiated in fauna. The very naivety of his representations suggests a love and respect for animals, and an intense and concentrated interest in them. The coloration and disposition of the drawings on the paper bespeak a natural good taste untouched by theory or fashion. They are childlike but not childish. They are fresh rather than
original.

By contrast, all the other exhibits display the pitfalls of intellection without intellect: the unsuccessful straining after significance, depth, and political virtue without any attachment whatever to beauty. The “artists” of the collectives look at the world through the distorting lens of doctrine with the most predictably dispiriting results.

This is not to say that political ideas have no place in art, for there is no subject matter that is a priori forbidden to it. To take as an example the “intensive food production” that is CookingSections’ subject, a great artist such as Goya or Daumier could easily have made much of it, but only because they were artists. The horrible fate of animals under conditions of mass production would, after all, have suited Goya’s sensibility admirably. No one who has seen his Perro semihundido (Half-drowned Dog) could doubt his ability to portray animals in distress, or his Desastres de la guerra (Disasters of War) doubt his capacity to portray cruelty on a large scale.

The problem with the collectives is that they have only their ideas to inspire or guide them. Of artistic ability, taste, or discipline they have none; with them, vehemence is a substitute for artistic competence and aesthetic judgment, as if sanctity of sentiment could rescue or overbalance ineptitude of execution. Even if their ideas were other than banal, they could not do it.

Mentally handicapped people, conversely, are free from the temptations of theorization, profound or banal as the case may be. They have no distorting theoretical lens through which they see the world, and neither are they propagandists.

Their other advantage is that they are not aware of the prestige that attaches, or at any rate once attached, to the status of artist. The members of the other collectives therefore strain after the status of artist as they also strain after depth and significance, but their urge to be artists, or to attain the status of artist, far exceeds their capacity to create anything worthwhile. They are artists in the same sense that young boys playing with toy guns are soldiers. And unlike the mentally handicapped, they subscribe to the romantic cult of originality. In a world with a less corrupted cultural life, their bluff would be called; instead, it is rewarded. Of all this, the mentally handicapped are quite innocent.

It came to me as a relief, but also a sorrow, to go to two small exhibitions in London directly after attending the Turner Prize exhibition, the first being of five views of Königstein painted by Bernardo Bellotto (1722–80) for Frederick Augustus, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, and the second being thirteen portraits of male subjects by Frans Hals (1582/3–1666).2 Only eighteen pictures in all, they were a joy to behold after immersion in the oh-so-earnest frivolity of contemporary British para-artistic activity, but also a painful reminder of the willful disregard of a glorious artistic tradition in favor of the destructive doctrine of originality at all costs.

The shallowness of that doctrine is illustrated by the career of Bellotto, who was Canaletto’s nephew. Having shown promise very early, Bellotto was taken by Canaletto into his studio well before he was fourteen, by which age the nephew was an accomplished draftsman. It seems that Canaletto taught him all that he knew and employed him in the production of views of Venice, for which the demand was very great, especially from England. Bellotto traveled throughout Italy, producing townscapes of Florence, Verona, and Rome. In 1744, he and his uncle parted company, uncle going to England and nephew to Dresden, where he was soon appointed court painter to Frederick Augustus.

Anyone who looks at a Bellotto townscape will immediately notice its affinities with the work of his uncle and teacher (indeed, Bellotto was known in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century as “Canaletto,” having appropiated the name for himself). At the same time, however, his paintings are instantly recognizable as his own: he was a continuator rather than a mere imitator of his uncle. His palette is darker than his uncle’s, but not somber. His figures in townscapes are more individual than in Canaletto’s vedute.

Artistic judgment is always fallible and subject to fashion.

I enter a surmise: that the difference between his work and that of his uncle and teacher (irrespective of their relative value) was not the result of any conscious effort on the part of Bellotto to distinguish himself. Being a different man from his uncle, he saw the world differently from his uncle; his originality was the natural consequence of being human, not that of a conscious effort to distinguish himself from anyone else. Here he painted; he could do no other. Of course, he was ambitious in a worldly way and, until Frederick the Great destroyed Dresden not quite as thoroughly as did the raf and usaf later (though still a commendable effort for its time), rich. Many of his paintings were intended to flatter the ruler and impress foreign dignitaries with the ruler’s magnificence and power; in that sense, they had political content. But insofar as the work had a political purpose, it was not at odds with beauty, rather the contrary. We shall look at Bellotto when Black Obsidian Sound System is but a footnote to the Turner Prize’s shameful history.

Of course, artistic judgment is always fallible and subject to fashion. Frans Hals, now acknowledged as one of the great masters of the Dutch Golden Age, was neglected for two centuries after his death until the fourth Marquis of Hertford bought the Laughing Cavalier in Paris in 1865 for what then seemed like a fabulous, even absurd, price. When the marquis’ illegitimate son, Sir Richard Wallace, moved the marquis’ collection from Paris to London, it was first housed in the East End, in Bethnal Green, where it was seen by two million visitors, many of the type who had never seen a picture before. Hals’s reputation has remained secure ever since the marquis’ purchase.

The catalogue of the exhibition reveals the workings of another fashion. The Director of the Wallace Collection, almost apologizing for his exhibition (of concentrated magnificence), writes in his foreword:

The all-male nature of this exhibition might seem misplaced in today’s world, particularly at a time when museums are working hard to diversify their audiences by supporting more inclusive programming. An exhibition about a white, male seventeenth-century painter who focuses his gaze on white, male sitters, who are predominantly very wealthy, is not necessarily a fit with these aims.

This gives one the impression, almost, that one is doing something disreputable by going to the exhibition, like attending a fascist rally or patronizing a sex shop. The director says:

Certain aspects of masculinity and male identity (the brutish, macho, bullish, or arrogant, for example) have had a bad press.

If the exhibition had been that of portraits of women would he dared have written what follows?

Certain aspects of femininity and female identity (the shrewish, trivial, vain, or maliciously backbiting, for example) have had a bad press.

The director doesn’t believe a word of it, of course, but feels constrained to say something to appease critics in advance.

Dr. Johnson wrote a graceful epitaph for his friend, Oliver Goldsmith:

Oliver Goldsmith: Poet, Naturalist, and Historian, who left scarcely any style of writing untouched, and touched nothing that he did not adorn.

We might adapt this slightly to

Wokeness: Doctrine, Fanaticism, Monomania, and Distortion, that leaves scarcely any human activity untouched, and touches nothing that it does not besmirch.

This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 40 Number 4 , on page 17
Copyright © 2021 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2021/12/all-turned-about

Statisticians have long been telling us how steeply the life-expectancy curve continues to rise. As a result, receiving an invitation to a one-hundredth birthday party, although surprising, is not necessarily shocking. Indeed, it is to just such an event that many in the worlds of finance, politics, and art were recently summoned. The birthday celebration in question was held in Madrid this mid-October and took the form of a symposium honoring Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, who was born exactly a century ago but actually died at age eighty-one in 2002. Centenarian or not, Thyssen was certainly a commanding presence during the second half of the last century. He was a grandson of August Thyssen (1842–1926), the diminutive but hugely assiduous and successful steel and coal entrepreneur. August has often been compared to Andrew Carnegie as a quintessential example of the nineteenth-century empire-building industrialist. Besides the famous name, H. H. (“Heini”) Thyssen also sported the title of baron, by way of his father who had dubiously “inherited” the prefix via his first wife’s Hungarian noble descent. Heini nevertheless maintained a keen sense of humor and occasionally quipped: “my family was in iron and steel—my mother ironed and my father stole.”

Growing up in a post-war Europe that was still beset by deprivation, Heini enjoyed privileges that, at that time, were reserved for the lucky few: private schools, fast cars, and long vacations in St. Moritz and Forte dei Marmi. He spoke fluent German, Italian, French, English, and Dutch, the last because Holland was his earliest home and, later, the center of his business interests. Tall and slender, the young man developed into a supremely elegant and worldly gentleman. Despite this, there was a certain shyness and insecurity in his manner that often complicated communication with others. This, however, never seemed to hinder Heini’s discourse with the opposite sex; he was married five times and sired four children. The man’s immense wealth was surely a factor in this rather confused personal life, but that wealth also contributed mightily to his becoming the most acquisitive, perceptive, and wide-ranging collector of his generation.

Rodin was that moment’s Jeff Koons, universally famous and wildly expensive.

The Thyssen family’s interest in art began, somewhat timidly, with August, “the patriarch,” as he was called. Having already lived a long and rigidly philistine life next to his blast furnaces, amassing a sizeable fortune in the process, August decided it was time to broaden his horizons, become a landed gentleman, and dabble in art. In 1903, he purchased the rather forbidding Schloß Landsberg in the town of Kettwig, near Essen, Germany (never too far from the blast furnaces). Having visited the 1899 Paris Exposition Universelle, he rememberedhow mesmerized he had been by the marbles of Auguste Rodin exhibited there. With the help of Rainer Maria Rilke, Thyssen eventually purchased seven major pieces that were later displayed at Landsberg. They have remained there in what has since become the Thyssen family’s memorial and mausoleum. Of note is the fact that Rodin was that moment’s Jeff Koons, universally famous and wildly expensive.

Of August’s three sons, Friedrich “Fritz” Thyssen (1873–1951) was the eldest, eventually inheriting the steel works that comprised the lion’s share of the estate. He was to be the first establishment industrialist to support Hitler and his National Socialist movement but was also the first, in 1938, to have second thoughts. Fritz even had the temerity to voice these opinions publicly. This headstrong behavior was characteristic of the man and afforded him the rare distinction of having been put behind bars by both the Nazis and the Allies. His only daughter, Anita, immigrated to South America after the war and bequeathed the bulk of her colossal fortune to form the “Thyssen Stiftung,” a foundation that has become Germany’s largest philanthropic undertaking.

Heinrich Thyssen (1875–1947) was the youngest of August’s sons, all of whom grew up detesting each other. Such was the animus that, while Fritz was hobnobbing with Göring, Heinrich, partly to spite his brother, married a Hungarian noblewoman, took on both her title and citizenship, and moved to Lugano, Switzerland. There, in 1931, Heinrich purchased, from the down-at-heel Prince Friedrich Leopold of Prussia, the enchanting Villa Favorita, a lakeside property that extends over a mile and comprises one palatial villa and three only slightly lesser structures. It was a perfect setting in which to indulge the newly minted baron’s ambitions of princely splendor. The obvious adjunct to this construct had to be a notable picture collection. In this, Heinrich’s timing was impeccable. The early 1930s saw a remarkable quantity of masterworks flow onward to a depressed buyers’ market. Aided by the sharp perception of the young German art historian Rudolph Heinemann, Heinrich snapped up in quick succession: the Family Group in a Landscape by Frans Hals (1645–48) and Vittore Carpaccio’s Young Knight in a Landscape (ca. 1505) (both had been owned by Otto Kahn in New York); the Profile Portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni by Ghirlandaio (1489–90, from the Morgan Library, New York); Christ Among the Doctors by Albrecht Dürer (1506) and St. Catherine of Alexandria by Caravaggio (ca. 1598–99) (both from the Barberini Collection, Rome)—all acknowledged to be capital works by the artists. Perhaps the most significant acquisition in this charmed moment was the addition to the collection of surely its greatest historical relic, the Portrait of Henry VIII by Hans Holbein the Younger (ca. 1537), formerly a star possession of the Earls Spencer (Princess Diana’s family) at Althorp House. Of the many similar likenesses of the king, none other than the Thyssen version is unequivocally recognized as the original prototype. Kenneth Clark, England’s ultimate art czar, upon a visit to the Villa Favorita, remarked that it was the one painting that should never have been allowed out of the country. These works remain to this day the principal identifying icons of the collection. As a footnote to the history of taste, it is interesting to record that Heinrich Thyssen so vehemently lusted after the Dürer that the dealers involved saw it as an opportunity to “unload” the Caravaggio as part of a two-for-one deal. Neither the market at large, nor Thyssen, cared much for the great Baroque genius—a reflection of the powerful influence “Berensonian” criticism had at the time. In a notorious judgment on Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of St. Peter (1601, in Rome at Santa Maria del Popolo), the American sage of I Tatti dismissed the masterpiece as simply a study in the lifting of weights.

It was a remarkable running start for the baron and, as noted by a venerable Italian proverb: “eating only increases one’s hunger.” Heinrich “ate” with ever-increasing hunger and soon even the spacious Villa Favorita would not do. In 1938, a substantial expansion of the villa was planned. Patterned on Munich’s Alte Pinakothek, “the Gallery” was completed in a grand and severe style vaguely reminiscent of Berlin’s now-destroyed Reich Chancellery, all marble and granite. To our eyes, it appears pompous and cold, but it was sky-lit and, most importantly, very congenial to the paintings. After entering an older structure, visitors arrive at a grand staircase leading up to a long series of large enfilade halls with more intimate adjoining spaces at the sides. Now the baron was able to indulge his hunger by continually enriching the collection, adding choice works of every European school and period, from Italian so-called “primitives” through the French eighteenth century, for a total of more than two hundred items. A Teutonic touch, perhaps, is that not a single English artist was represented. By the time he died in 1947, Baron Heinrich had amassed a collection that was already, by far, the most important private gathering of European Old Master paintings in the world—a statement inevitably followed by the conditional “after the Queen of England’s.” The informal “curator” continued to be Rudolph Heinemann, except during the war years when he prudently retreated to New York. Conservation work was usually performed by William Suhr of the Frick Collection before the paintings were sold. Criticism is still heard occasionally about Suhr’s overly “energetic” interventions. No professional conservator had ever worked on-site until 1964, when this writer was appointed on a part-time basis. There was never a question about the role of “Chief Curator”; that function was always reserved for the Thyssens themselves—the father, Heinrich, and then, after his death in 1947, his son “Heini.”

Heinrich remained always fanatically protective of his, and his collection’s, privacy. Access to the Villa Favorita was accorded with the greatest reluctance. In the late 1930s, Germany’s foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop happened to be visiting Lugano. As was the custom at the time, he sent his calling card to the villa expecting a gracious invitation to visit the storied precincts of the famed collection. The baron instructed his butler to reply that he didn’t need any more champagne, a sly rebuff playing off the fact that, prior to Ribbentrop becoming a Nazi bigwig, he had worked as a traveling salesman for Henkell Sektkellerei (Germany’s downmarket version of French bubbly). Private and decidedly strait-laced, Baron Heinrich was only tainted by scandal once, when his second wife Maud, a beautiful and frenetic socialite, was involved in a car crash while playing hooky in Spain with her lover, the Georgian “Prince” Alexis Mdivani. The Isotta Fraschini convertible was totaled, the “prince” perished, and the baroness’s priceless pearls disappeared from her luggage. Thereafter, Maud’s title lasted only until divorce papers could be filed. It was also a sad end to one of the glamorous Mdivani brothers, dubbed “the marrying Mdivanis” by the press. Once, an enterprising reporter sought out the young men’s father in Bucharest. To a question about the family, the old man replied: “I am the only father who inherited a title from his sons.”

After Heinrich’s death, his son Heini was faced with significant issues relating to the family business. Although he had already been appointed as principal heir to the estate, including the Villa Favorita and the collection, there were lingering “denazification” questions about interlocking interests with Uncle Fritz’s more suspect holdings. It took several years and endless lawyering to resolve these. Perhaps as a gesture of goodwill, Heini decided to make the collection available to visitors on weekends (for five Swiss francs), a move that father Heinrich would surely not have condoned. Still, the collection remained for years a rather esoteric destination for a smattering of connoisseurs and academics; there was no permanent on-site staff except for a fiercely loyal but unschooled caretaker who had previously served as a stable hand on the Bornemisza estate in Hungary. Then, in 1978, everything changed.

Entirely by chance and through mutual acquaintances, Heini was introduced to a sixty-something lady named Annemarie Pope. Born in Germany and the widow of John Alexander Pope, formerly the director of Washington’s Freer Gallery, she was a relentless and obsessive striver who had gained a prominent niche in the capital’s social and arts milieux. Mrs. Pope’s proudest achievement was the creation of “The International Exhibitions Foundation,” an undertaking that she not only invented but also promoted with unflagging energy. Her D.C. connections proved essential in obtaining government-backed insurance indemnity, a must for traveling exhibitions. It helped to have the friendship and trust of Carter Brown, the director of the National Gallery; this opened endless doors—among others, those to the drawing collections of the Duke of Devonshire and of Vienna’s Albertina—and led to two (among a hundred fifty other) epochal shows that toured numerous major museums in America in the 1960s and ’70s.

Having met Thyssen, the redoubtable Mrs. Pope would not give up until she secured his promise of a U.S. loan. Heini finally surrendered to the lady’s blandishments and even consented to part temporarily with a number of his most precious possessions—among them, the Van Eyck Annunciation Diptych (ca.1433–35) and the double-sided Portrait of a Young Man Praying by Hans Memling (ca. 1485). Of course, it wasn’t the first time that these treasures had left their home. A similar selection of masterworks had been shown at the National Gallery in London in 1961. Heini’s third wife, the Scottish beauty Fiona Campbell Walter, may have played a part in that decision. Presumably, feminine attraction was not a factor in his agreeing to Mrs. Pope’s 1978 initiative. The American exhibition was accompanied by a handsome catalogue written by the Princeton scholar Allen Rosenbaum on the suggestion of Sir John Pope-Hennessy. Needless to say, the exhibition caused considerable commotion in its three destinations—Washington, Detroit, and Los Angeles. Heini and his wife at the time, Denise, graciously played “host” at the openings. It was too good to be true for the locals: rarely seen great art and a chance to patter with glamorous and titled international celebrities. What could be better?

Surprisingly, the normally shy and somewhat introverted baron enjoyed every minute of the spotlight. He happily posed for photographs, gave interviews, and delivered amusing remarks at the inaugural dinners. It was all a resounding success while, at the same time, revealing the necessity for more dedicated and professional stewardship of what had now become a quite public institution. A friend of the baron suggested that he meet Simon de Pury, a young assistant in Sotheby’s Geneva office. Simon fit the task to a T: he was smart, worldly, and ambitious and took to the job with gusto. The timing was also propitious. Heini’s business interests had begun to focus on the Soviet Union. On one of his visits to Leningrad, he had met Boris Piotrovsky, the director of the State Hermitage Museum. Eager for better liaisons in the West, the enterprising Piotrovsky suggested a loan exhibition at the Villa Favorita. It was an ideal venue in politically neutral Switzerland, even though the correspondent would be Thyssen, the quintessential capitalist. Simon quickly got into high gear a project for a selection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works to travel to Lugano. It was 1983 and the impact of the event was far beyond what even Mrs. Pope could have ever imagined. Not only had the paintings never been seen in Europe, they had also been locked in an upstairs no-go zone at the Hermitage since the early 1920s. When the stupendous trove of masterworks by Matisse, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Renoir, and Bonnard arrived, the Villa Favorita became, overnight, the center of the art world. There were breathless reviews in every paper and periodical, and visitors lined up for hours in queues stretching back to the town. The unprecedented blowout was followed by further exchanges and attendant accolades.

The “Russian shows” blew winds from new and different directions across the lake of Lugano. They may have encouraged Heini to look beyond the European Old Masters towards the German Expressionists, the Russian avant-garde, even the American nineteenth- and twentieth-century masters. Again, it was just in the nick of time, for he had understood that most notable French Impressionist works had already found permanent homes. No matter; with the help of Antonina Gmurzynska of Cologne, Heini procured, among others, works by Kasímir Malevich and László Moholy-Nagy. From Norbert Ketterer in nearby Campione came the stunning Max Beckmann portrait of his wife, Quappi in Pink Jumper (1932–34),and a number of early Lyonel Feiningers as well as works by Emil Nolde and Oskar Kokoschka. In New York, the notorious dealer Andrew Crispo, despite his other rather sinister pursuits, was a very knowledgeable and effective source of important examples of American art. By far the most memorable of these is the Signal of Distress by Winslow Homer (1890–96), comparable if not superior to the Metropolitan’s celebrated Gulf Stream (1899). It is still astonishing to consider the breadth and diversity of these purchases—by a collector weaned on the European “classics,” a collector who could, when the occasion arose, also turn on a dime back to his first love. That occasion presented itself dramatically when Silvano Lodi, an astute dealer, set up shop in a charming lakefront house, also in Campione. Silvano soon became a magnet for Italian “runners” who would bring him first-rate material, knowing that (unlike his colleagues in Italy) he would instantly pay top price, in cash and tax-free. Two of Heini’s several purchases from Silvano are worthy of note for their exceptional rarity and impeccable conservation: a tondoon panel of the Virgin and Child with the Infant St. John and St. Jerome by the Sienese Mannerist master Domenico Beccafumi (ca. 1523–25), and the ineffably sexy Venus and Mars (ca. 1600),a tiny jewel of a painting by Carlo Saraceni. Doubtless the unabashed erotic depiction of the amorous couple got Heini’s motor running.

By the later 1980s, Heini was well into his sixth decade and, understandably, thinking about the disposition of his legacy. Having turned over the bulk of his business interests to his eldest son, Georg Heinrich, he was now focused primarily on the collection and its future. It represented an estimated $600-plus million invested in enlarging and diversifying what he had inherited from his father. Throughout his adult life, Heini remained steadfast in an abiding intention that this cultural patrimony should never be dispersed. He teased the Swiss government and the Ticino canton with the prospect of a much-expanded new museum that would be large enough to contain the entirety of Thyssen’s vast holdings. A design competition for the new building was announced, and maquettes by the likes of Norman Foster, Santiago Calatrava, and Lugano’s own Mario Botta were unveiled. The unspoken understanding was that, while the project would be underwritten with public funds, the collection would be deeded to a public foundation that would maintain it. There remained, however, an insurmountable problem: the collection now counted as the principal asset of Heini’s eventual estate, and therefore one that would risk being dismembered in litigation among the offspring of four different marriages. The legal landscape to be traversed was decidedly arduous. It appeared to be made even more difficult when, in 1985, Heini married his fifth wife, Carmen “Tita” Cervera, and legally adopted her son from a previous relationship. Whatever his children might have thought of this event, it actually proved to be the first step in the successful path toward a solution.

The new baroness happened to have excellent connections in Spain, just as that country was entering a period of spectacular economic expansion and prosperity. It was termed “el milagro Ibérico” and lasted just long enough for negotiations to be completed for a “deal” that would provide not only for the lasting integrity of the collection, but also for its display in a grandly refurbished Madrid palace, with Thyssen’s name on the door. Integral to the agreement was the payment of several hundred million dollars to the presumptive heirs who would then sign off, giving their consent. It was a brilliant solution and wholly without precedent in the history of collecting and museum governance. The only distant and not wholly comparable example is the late-nineteenth-century accession by the Yale University Art Gallery of the Jarves Collection of Early Italian paintings, which was a case of a willing seller/benefactor and a very reluctant buyer.

The Thyssen Collection is the result of the tastes, passions, and ambitions of two quite different individuals.

The Thyssen Collection actually does not hang in its entirety in Madrid. For political reasons, a number of first-rate pictures, including the incomparable Madonna of Humility by Fra Angelico (1433–35), were dispatched with other lesser works to Barcelona as a token of Catalan “independence.” If there is a problem, it resides in the word “entirety.” It must be remembered that the Thyssen Collection is the result of the tastes, passions, and ambitions of two quite different individuals. Heinrich, the father, acquired art in a very favorable moment, adhering as much as possible to the highest standards of quality, historical significance, and conservation. There was much material available, and he tried to choose the best with the best advice. Heinrich must have tried very hard to avoid embarrassing mistakes. By and large he was successful, though there are some misses. Heini loved the process of buying; he enjoyed the chase, and, more often than not, came to decisions rapidly and instinctively. Given the choice between two similar items, his instinct generally guided him in the right direction. If he had an issue, it was his seemingly insatiable appetite. There are five landscapes by Jacob van Ruisdael in the collection, only one of which is truly first-rate. Bronzino is represented twice: Cosimo de Medici in Armor (ca. 1545) is decidedly not worthy of the collection, while the Portrait of a Young Man as St. Sebastian (ca. 1533) is one of the artist’s best early works while still under the spell of his master, Pontormo. When the mediocre pictures were at the Villa Favorita, they were, essentially, in a private setting—as if they were hanging in one’s home, immune to critical judgment. The rigorous context of a museum demands more fastidious criteria of quality and conservation. No doubt the professionals responsible for the Madrid display were aware of such shortcomings, of which there were more than a few. Yet, how else to justify the public expenditure of such an eye-popping amount (though only a third of the full, fair-market-value appraisal), if not by hanging as much material as possible on view? The puckish subtext is that not one in a thousand visitors will distinguish varsity from JV when four similarly labeled paintings hang together in a museum.

These minor details, and a possible objection to the color scheme of the setting, are insignificant quibbles when compared to the greatness of the achievement: an awe-inspiring compendium of the visual arts, spanning many centuries and cultures, housed in a rigorously designed contemporary setting in one of Europe’s principal cities—it is Heini Thyssen’s legacy writ large. In this hundredth-anniversary event, there was much to remember and to celebrate. The twenty-eight contributors to the symposium appropriately honored the museum’s founder with a wide range of revealing insights, anecdotes, and critical analyses. Heini Thyssen would approve and be grateful of the way the institution that bears his name tipped its hat to him. In time, perhaps, the museum will see fit to publish the symposium’s proceedings, ensuring access to the material in the future.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 40 Number 4, on page 22
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