-Caveat Lector-
www.ctrl.org
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
<A HREF="">ctrl</A>
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza De Kaszon, Art collector
1921-2002
Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen- Bornemisza De Kaszon, who has died in Spain aged
81, was one of the richest men in Europe - his fortune has been estimated at
more than £2 billion ($5.4 billion) - and the owner of one of the world's great
art collections.
When ''Heini" Thyssen inherited from his father, Heinrich, a vast collection
of old masters, he thought there were ''already too many ... I felt sure I would
never have to buy another as long as I lived".
But when Heinrich's will was challenged under Swiss law by his three other
children, and the collection was broken up, young Heini became obsessed with the
urge to buy back pictures taken by his siblings and to add more and more works
of art to his portfolio. The original collection of 400 old masters grew to one
of nearly 600, while Thyssen acquired another 900 modern works.
In later years, he devoted most of his time, and up to £40 million a year, to
art deals. His only rival in scale of possessions was the Queen, ''but," the
baron observed dryly, ''I think the Queen is not, perhaps, really a
collector."
");document.write("
advertisement
");
}
}
// --> >
Thyssen was extraordinarily eclectic in his taste, buying Jackson Pollock one
day, Holbein the next. He was genuinely passionate about art. ''It is universal.
It is impossible to have a disagreeable conversation about it. It should be
shared by everyone," he declared.
But he was also notably hard-headed about its financial value. He expected
governments to pay for the privilege of public access to his collection and
often deployed loans from it to open doors on behalf of his business
interests.
By 1986, the collection had overwhelmed the Villa Favorita. Thyssen was
concerned that the bulk of it should be kept together after his death and had
secured an agreement with his children to that effect.
He then asked the Swiss authorities to fund an enlargement of his museum, but
they offered less than $3 million. Piqued, Thyssen embarked on a search for a
new site outside Switzerland which would be worthy of his patronage. Both Prince
Charles and Mrs Thatcher flew to Switzerland to put in a bid for Britain;
President Mitterrand lobbied for France; the Getty Foundation offered millions
of dollars for the United States; and the Swiss Government tried to block the
paintings' export.
But in 1993 the pressure of the bedroom decided matters in favour of the
birthplace of the baron's fifth wife, Carmen ''Tita" Cervera, a former Miss
Spain 22 years his junior and widow of Tarzan of the Apes actor Lex
Barker. She negotiated with the Spanish government, which paid more than £241
million for the collection, and donated the Villahermosa palace in Madrid, near
the Prado, to house it.
The contract was for 10 years but, after further negotations, it was agreed
that the Villahermosa should became its permanent home. The sale, unsuccessfully
opposed by his children, was the largest transfer of art from one country to
another since Napoleon took his spoils of war back to Paris.
Hans Heinrich Thyssen- Bornemisza de Kaszon was born at Scheveningen, near
The Hague, in 1921, the fourth and youngest child of Heinrich von Thyssen, a
wealthy German industrialist, and Margit Bornemisza, a Hungarian aristocrat. The
family empire, founded on shipbuilding, coal, steel and iron, had been started
by the baron's grandfather, August, who left his fortune to his two sons, Fritz
and Heinrich, in 1926.
The grandfather was not a collector on the scale of his son and grandson but
was an admirer of Rodin, from whom he commissioned a set of six marble
sculptures (they remain one of the gems of the collection). Relations between
the brothers were acrimonious, with Fritz a sympathiser and financial supporter
of the Nazis; his industrial interests would eventually form the basis of the
Thyssen-Krupp group.
Heini endured an extremely lonely childhood. He rarely saw his parents, who
divorced when he was eight, but by his own account no-one told him of the
break-up until three years later. His mother remarried, to a Hungarian diplomat,
while his father moved to the Villa Favorita at Lugano.
Heini began work in a Thyssen-owned bank in Rotterdam. But when the Germans
invaded Holland in 1939 he was summoned by his father to Switzerland, where he
studied law and economics at Fribourg and Bern.
When his father died in 1947, Thyssen inherited, besides the picture
collection, a business conglomerate which had suffered extensive damage during
the war. All 12 Thyssen ships had been sunk; their Ruhr mines, Bremen shipyards
and Rotterdam dockyards were all in ruins.
The 26-year-old baron began rebuilding the empire, moving away from iron and
steel to concentrate on shipbuilding, banking and a stake in the Heineken
brewery in Holland, manufacturing and real estate in North America and sheep
farming in Australia. The Thyssen- Bornemisza Group, run from Monaco and still
controlled by the family, grew to employ 14,000 people around the world.
The rhythms of international business, art dealing and jet-set social life
attuned with Thyssen's fundamentally restless nature. Although Dutch by birth,
German and Hungarian by ancestry, Swiss by citizenship and a resident of Monaco
for tax purposes, he lived most frequently in later years in Spain, where he had
four homes.
In Switzerland, besides the Villa Favorita, he had a chalet at St Moritz.
There was a villa in Jamaica and pieds-a-terre in Paris and New York. In England
he kept a house in Chester Square and for a time owned a Regency mansion in
Gloucestershire. Although his English was accented, his tailoring was pure
Savile Row.
Thyssen collected beautiful women rather as he collected homes and works of
art - though he once observed that ''unlike women, the pictures can't talk
back", and, as one newspaper put it, old mistresses tended to be more
troublesome to him than old masters. He married first, in 1946, Princess Theresa
de Lippe, by whom he had a son, Georg Heinrich (Heini jnr).
In 1953 Thyssen began an affair with Nina Dyer, an English model, to whom he
gave a Caribbean island, two sports cars with gold-plated ignition keys, a black
panther and a fortune in jewellery. He divorced Theresa and married Nina in
1954.
But it soon transpired that Nina loved an impoverished French actor. ''It
sounds silly," Thyssen once remarked, ''but I hate to divorce. It's a most
disagreeable operation." Nevertheless, he swiftly divested himself of Nina Dyer
and, having declared that he intended ''to stay a bachelor for some time",
married another English model, Fiona Campbell-Walter, in 1956.
His third wife gave him another son, Lorne, and a daughter, Francesca - who
in 1993 married Archduke Karl von Habsburg, grandson of the last Habsburg
emperor. But Thyssen divorced Fiona Campbell-Walter in 1964 and took as his next
wife Denise Shorto, a Brazilian banker's daughter, who was to remain with him
for 17 years and bear him another son, Alexander.
His fourth divorce was his most acrimonious. Denise brought a High Court
action to prove that Thyssen's disposable wealth was at least three times the
£400 million he had declared; he responded with criminal charges alleging that
she had failed to return family heirlooms worth £77 million.
After four years of wrangling the case was dismissed, Denise having proved
that one disputed item - a 107-carat diamond set in a £2 million necklace - had
been specially created for her, with a note attached to it from Thyssen saying:
''Darling, sorry for all my faults."
In 1981 Thyssen met his fifth wife, Carmen ''Tita" Cervera, while holidaying
on the Costa Smeralda in Sardinia, but marriage had to wait until 1985, when the
legal battle with Denise was settled. Relations between ''Baron Heini" and his
older children were aggravated by this marriage to Tita, whom Francesca
described as ''the wicked stepmother". Four years ago, he accused his oldest
son, Georg, of negligence in the running of the family trust, which had been
signed over to him five years earlier after the baron had suffered a stroke.
Baron Heini launched court proceedings against Georg to regain control of the
billion-dollar holdings in the Bahamas. Finally, last year, the two came to a
private agreement.
Carmen, an amateur painter with flamboyant tastes in interior design, took a
close interest in the refurbishment of the Villahermosa Palace, to the chagrin
of the Spanish artistic establishment. The couple became an almost permanent
feature of the pages of Hola!, the Spanish progenitor of Hello!
magazine. Thyssen adopted as his fifth child Carmen's son Borja, whose natural
father she never publicly named.
Now, with his widow the new vice-chairwoman of the foundation in charge of
the Thyssen Museum in Madrid and his children in control of the remaining works,
the family is set for a dramatic return to court.
The Guardian and DailyTelegraph, London
Please let us stay on topic and be civil.-Home Page- www.cia-drugs.org
OM
www.ctrl.org
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
<A HREF="">ctrl</A>
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]