Female art at the Heidi Horten Collection in Vienna

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The Museum named after Heidi Horten has recently become part of the dense museum landscape of the Austrian capital, but it seems to have already managed to carve out its own space, also thanks to its very central position between the State Opera and Albertina. Its main factor of attraction is a collection of modern and contemporary art that crosses artists and nations, and boasts masterpieces now unattainable for the budgets of state museums: from Klimt to Picasso, from Chagall to Rodin, from Yves Klein to Fontana, from Warhol to Basquiat, to Damien Hirst.

Viennese born in 1941, strong with assets of one billion dollars inherited in 1987 from a controversial husband 30 years older, and then shrewdly brought to fruition until he was estimated to triple by Forbes in 2018, Horten has lavished his passion for the art in non-stop acquisitions in auctions and galleries since the 1990s, always advised by Agnes Husslein-Arco, a former Sotheby’s official and former director of the Belvedere, who in 2018 managed to convince her client to exhibit that piece to the public good luck in the context of a first and only guest exhibition in another museum: until then those paintings and sculptures had discreetly embellished only Horten’s various residences.

Media success

The success of that initiative also in the media gave rise to the idea of ​​creating an entirely personal museum, which was followed by the lightning-fast purchase of a building in the heart of the capital, a radical restoration and the creation of an organizational structure capable of managing that artistic treasure over time . The severe stumbling block first of more than well-founded doubts and then of proven certainties about the origin of the money to finance villas and mega-yachts, social life and precisely art, did not stop the museum project, nor its marketing, immediately focused entirely on the quality of the collection and on the sure taste of the owner.

Only on the museum’s website is the link offered to visitors to a recent study on the widespread activity of “Aryanization” of Jewish goods, which during the Nazism helped her husband Helmut amass a fortune and build an empire of about fifty department stores scattered around the Germany: gazing ahead, and with her personal certainty of her own extraneousness to the facts disputed with her husband, Heidi Horten has, so to speak, bet on the strength of oblivion, which in fact has already quickly blurred the historical background, leaving undisturbed that more than considerable corpus of works.

Death before the opening of the museum

Heidi Horten missed the opening of her museum due to an illness that cut her life short in a few days. But her sudden disappearance has not affected projects, tools, acquisition plans, already firmly decided for the long term. Under the guidance of Agnes Husslein-Arco, the exhibition entitled “LOOK”, open until 16 April, also appears as a tribute to the collector and her being a woman. In fact, 110 paintings and sculptures thematize femininity in its most diverse forms, and are complemented by 22 haute couture dresses, designed specifically for Horten by stylists such as Christian Dior, Givenchy, Yves Saint Laurent, or Jean Patou. The sumptuous roundup of works starts with a purchase from 2022: a Biedermeier portrait by Friedrich von Amerling, aimed at inaugurating an opening of the collection towards the deep nineteenth century; it then continues between Matisse, Degas, Picasso, Mirò, Francis Bacon and Gerhard Richter, and ends with the incisive creations of Sylvie Fleury, Birgit Jürgenssen, Gelatin, Igor Mitoraj and Anselm Kiefer, present with a sculpture from 2022.