Controversy in Vienna over the opening of a new museum created with a fortune from Nazi looting

A rich widow, whose great passion is art, decides to open a museum in Vienna, which will have an impressive collection of more than 500 works of modern art by creators such as Basquiat, Andy Warhol or Dan Flavin.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
02 June 2022 Thursday 05:26
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Controversy in Vienna over the opening of a new museum created with a fortune from Nazi looting

A rich widow, whose great passion is art, decides to open a museum in Vienna, which will have an impressive collection of more than 500 works of modern art by creators such as Basquiat, Andy Warhol or Dan Flavin. So far so good, worthy even of the beginning of a Hollywood script. But the story becomes more cinematographic if possible after learning that part of her fortune comes from an inheritance of suspicious origin.

The museum in question is the Heidi Horten Collection and it is neither more nor less than the personal project of Heidi Goëss-Horten, the richest woman in Austria, whose wealth Forbes magazine estimates at 2,600 million euros.

But much of that money was left to her when her first husband, Helmut Horten, a German businessman who was a member of the Nazi Party and became a millionaire during World War II, died. Horten was the founder of Horten AG, a department store chain. The couple married in 1966, after six years of dating, when she was 25 and he was 55.

The private gallery is located in a historic building in the heart of Vienna, between the State Opera and the Albertina Museum. The Open exhibition is the one that has kicked off, with 50 works by contemporary artists, including Erwin Wurm, the Lalanne duo and Alighiero Boetti.

The plan is to organize between two and three shows a year, taking advantage of the fund of half a thousand pieces from the collection, which Goëss-Horten acquired in recent years, partly under the advice of Husslein-Arco.

Faced with the controversy over the origins of her immense fortune, the millionaire commissioned a report on her husband's business activity, the conclusion of which was that the tycoon took advantage of Nazi policy by acquiring properties from robbed Jews at a low price, but without actively provoking those usurpations.

The 1,000 million dollars that she inherited from her husband in 1987 placed her on the Forbes list of the 500 richest people in the world, and allowed her to expand the art collection that the couple already had, adding pieces by artists such as Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse or René Magritte.