Picasso and Lobsters: My “Rendez-Vous” with Heidi Horten

To say that I had misgivings about visiting the Heidi Horten Collection during a recent stay in Vienna is an understatement, especially in light of the scandal surrounding the scrapped auction of Horten’s jewelry, misappropriated as it was from Jewish families from whose disenfranchisement Horten and her husband demonstrably profited.  

“Christie’s Cancels Sale of Jewelry Connected to Nazi-Era Fortune,” a 31 August 2023 headline in the New York Times read.  According to the article, the “decision follow[ed] a backlash from Jewish organizations after the auction house generated $202 million” in an earlier sale of Horten’s hoarded treasures.

My views on the Heidi Horten Collection—just like my viewing of the temporary exhibition “Rendez-Vous: Picasso, Chagall, Klein and Their Times” then on show there—were no doubt skewed.  And yet, I am certain that I would have felt just as disturbed and affronted had I been unaware of the controversy.

What I encountered at the grandiloquently rechristened Palais Goëss-Horten—raised on the site of a purposely razed early twentieth-century chancellery of which only the façade and side wings were retained—is as smug as it is spurious: a glossy museal commemoration of Horten’s nose—or her practically unlimited funds—for art.

Worse than whitewashing, the Heidi Horten Collection is the gilding of a guilt by association that, judging from the autobiographical dimensions of the display and its flaunting of acquired tastes, was probably never felt to begin with by the self-styled philanthropist whose name it bears.  Here she is, the building proudly pronounces, Heidi in plain sight.

The “pocket guide” to a previous exhibition titled “Look,” makes a virtue of the fact that the “museum itself provides impressive evidence” of Horten’s “personality.”  The ambitious architecture and the generous space accorded to the paintings, sculptures and objets d’art housed there—a feat eulogized in the inaugural exhibition “Open” in 2022—bespeak a conspicuous silence about the unsavory aspects of Helmut and Heidi Horten’s capital gains.  This, I felt, is a showcase that unwittingly presents itself as a show trial, a spectacle in which a bejewelled finger of suspicion points squarely at those hoarding Hortens.

The visit brought back memories of my childhood in post-World War II West Germany, when Horten was a major department store chain, an emporium and empire built on a foundation whose origins were effaced by rebranding.  Like the far from indelible past of many transmogrified moguls resurfacing all but unscathed in the Bundesrepublik in new and officially sanctioned guises, Helmut Horten’s profitable relations with—or cozy embedment within—the Nazi regime was kept largely under wraps, suspicious though this hardly miraculous rise from the ashes—a necrogenous regeneration of matter piled up in death camp ovens—must have struck at least some Germans emerging from the rubble to which much of the Third Reich infrastructure was reduced.  The marveled at Wirtschaftswunder (the “economic miracle”) of the 1950s was as much a conjuring act as it was a con. 

The Heidi Horten “collection”—a euphemism for the pocketing of cultural riches whose accumulation was facilitated, at least initially, by unscrupulous dealings—struck me as a monument to cultural appropriation.  “The two world wars […] had a profound impact on artistic and cultural life,” one text panel blandly generalizes.  “Following the German occupation of Paris beginning in June 1940, the National Socialists seized control of the art and cultural sectors, ultimately suppressing the creative and intellectual elite.”  What about the financial elite of the postwar years and the suppression of their seizures of art?

The gallery texts offer no contextualisation for the acquisition of the works on display.  The death of Helmut Horten in 1987 is stated as a marker to differentiate what his widow, who died just days before the opening of the extravagant tomb she insisted on having erected for herself, subsequently added to the holdings.

The exhibition “Rendez-Vous”—a word meaning not only “meeting” but “presenting yourself”—proposes to turn “the wheel of time almost 150 years.” Clearly, the wheel is not permitted to get stuck on the years in which Nazis presumably turned Germans and Austrians again.

In the context of the 1940s and 1950s—the period in which the majority of the objects in “Rendez-Vous” were created—what is especially disturbing about the Heidi Horten Collection is its hubris to celebrate the glamorous lifestyle of the Hortens, a salute that makes token gestures at contextualization of Modernism, such as references to “rebels liv[ing] in poverty” or attempts at “integrating people on the margins of society,” ring hollow.

In one text panel, the war is referred to in passing as an inconvenience to the rich: “The first Cannes Film Festival originally planned for September 1939” was “prevented by World War II,” we are told.  After it eventually “took place in 1946,” the curators let out a sigh of relief, “international showbiz took hold of the Côte d’Azur and made it a haven for celebrities and the jet set.” After those disruptive years, I take it, the world finally came to its not so common senses to resume its originally scheduled programming for the benefit of an elite but appreciative audience.

The Heidi Horten Collection is not simply an egoseum, a vanity project devoted to a public display of wealth by private collectors who, in their dotage or from the beyond, make their possessions accessible to the masses, ostensibly for their collective and individual benefit but primarily for the lasting glorification of the alleged benefactor.  Given its cover-up of the collectors’ past, a more apt term to describe it might be ruseum.

It is not enough, apparently, to demonstrate affluence and influence through the display of art historically significant objects. Two galleries are devoted to the Hortens’ villa—which, according to a gallery label, Heidi Horten “repeatedly adapted […] to suit her needs”—and the couple’s yacht, a model of which is showcased in an elaborate coffin.  Meanwhile, the Horten’s bamboo pool bar juts into the exhibition space, reminding us just who is meant to be toasted here.

Another gallery makes a display of Heidi Horten’s frivolous foray into interior design, interventions that highlight her indifference to the cultures and origins of the objects she amassed, including a line-up of four silver lobsters forming a quadrille, a reference, I gather, to Alice in Wonderland: “Will you, won’t you, will you, / Won’t you, won’t you join the dance?” I felt like sitting this one out.

Summing up Horten’s “personality” most effectively is a black-and-white photograph of temporarily un(wo)maned ironing boards at which unseen servants toiled to meet her “needs.”  The image speaks volumes about the Hortens’ attitudes toward individuals in their employ and, by extension, all the anonymized somebodies at the expense—or presupposed expendability—of whom the couple made a killing.  

“Reich,” in the German language, is both a noun and an adjective; it means “empire” as well as “being rich.”  It brought to mind that it took a third empire, meant to last a thousand years, to make Horten as “reich” as she demonstrates herself to have been.

Vienna has long shown a reluctance to own up to its past during annexation.  A glossy façade behind which a history of rampant opportunism lies concealed, the Heidi Horten Collection is an ominous signpost of things to come as the concretized specter of the far right, proudly parading the entitlement of long contested majorities, rears its arrogantly upright head the world over.