It seemed like a dazzling opportunity.
A treasure trove of jewelry from Cartier, Bulgari and Harry Winston, assembled over decades by Austrian billionaire Heidi Horten and now offered for sale at a global auction house.
But there was a wrinkle, a big one: Horten inherited the wealth of her late husband, World War II Nazi Party member Helmut Horten, whose fortune was built by buying up Jewish businesses under duress in the part of Hitler’s Aryanization process. .
Heidi Horten, a former secretary who met Helmut Horten in a bar in 1959, died last year. Her estate, which includes a foundation with a significant art collection, approached Christie’s and Sotheby’s to sell the jewelry.
The Heidi Horten Collection in Vienna. Photo by Rupert Steiner, ©Heidi Horten Collection.
Auction houses are no strangers to complicated provenances. Think Russian oligarchs, the Saudi royal family, tax evaders and suspected pedophiles, to name a few nasty varieties of former owners. But as long as the items have a clear title and haven’t been stolen, they’re usually ready to sell, especially if they can fetch millions of dollars along the way. The assumption is that collectors are adults and can decide how to spend their money.
“At auction houses, you don’t veer into moral relativity territory,” a former executive told me this week. “What is the limit here? »
And so, when the Horten estate beckoned, the auction houses dispatched their best and brightest – from regional representatives and department heads all the way to CEOs – for the high-stakes pitch with the estate. It was considered the Paul Allen moment of the jewelry world. “A collection of this importance should have the highest level of membership, including moral membership,” the former leader said.
Christie’s won, and soon the auction house began cataloging the collection. The pieces were all purchased after the war, from the 1970s, and often at auction. Helmut Horten, who died in 1987, was first described in Christie’s promotional materials as “a German entrepreneur and philanthropist”. The Nazi roots of his wealth have been conveniently overlooked.
In early April, hundreds of Horten gems went on a month-long world tour, starting in Hong Kong and stopping in New York, London, Vienna, Taipei, Shanghai, Singapore, Taichung and Dubai before a series of auctions in Geneva in May.
Estimated at $150 million in total, the group’s valuation eclipsed the record treasures of Elizabeth Taylor and the Al Thani family. Christie’s promotional material describes it as a “glorious assemblage” of “impeccable quality and scale, showcasing the art of jewelery in all its glory”.
Fancy pink diamond of 20.06 carats from the Heidi Horten collection. Courtesy of Christie’s
But Christie’s failure to divulge the roots of Horten’s wealth has not gone unnoticed. customers love Cathy Lasry, the wife of billionaire Marc Lasry, complained. Holocaust survivors and Jewish organizations called the shipment whitewashing and threatened to stage protests. In its defense, Christie’s said it took on the collection, in part because its proceeds would go to charity. He ended up adding a few sentences about Helmut Horten’s Nazi past.
The furor around the sale did little to dampen market excitement for rubies and diamonds. The first auctions raised $202 million, with 98 percent of the lots sold. A Cartier ring fetched $15 million, the highest price to date. The second batch of Horten jewelry – another 300 lots – is expected to go on sale in November.
“Basically, some Jewish groups were outspoken, but the world didn’t seem to care,” said a current auction manager. “The market doesn’t care.”
It seemed that Christie’s had managed to get away with it.
And yet, the indignation does not go away. Despite the apparent financial success, the sale turned into a publicity nightmare, the fallout from which continues to reverberate months after the first hammer blow.
This week, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art canceled a restitution event hosted by Christie’s due to take place in December, the grand finale of the auction house’s year-long program marking the 25th anniversary of the Washington Principles, a watershed moment in restitution.
The main building of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Photo: Elad Sarig.
The blowback also presents an optical challenge for Christie’s restitution department, which has been involved in some of the key cases over the years. In 2006, Adele Bloch-Bauer’s heirs sold their returned Klimts through Christie’s. Adele Bloch-Bauer’s dazzling 1907 portrait became the cornerstone of Ronald Lauder’s Neue Galerie in New York.
Whether Jewish heirs will be as comfortable entrusting returned material to Christie’s post-Horten is an open question.
In the meantime, the consequences of the sale have been a grief for Marc Porter, president of Christie’s Americas who for years led the home’s restitution work, and who also happens to be a trustee of the Tel Aviv Museum American Friends, a fundraiser band based in New York. Porter, whose parents are Holocaust survivors, was not involved in the Horten sale, sources tell me, and the restitution department of Christie’s, which handles the processing of objects acquired in Europe from 1933 to 1945 None of the jewelry was looted. Holocaust victims, a spokesman for the auction house said.
But, to date, Christie’s has shown little contrition or even doubt about the sale. Yes, he eventually acknowledged he “could have been more transparent” about the source of Horten’s wealth – only to justify the omission by saying the billionaire’s story was “well-documented”. Yes, he promised to donate some of the proceeds from the sale to a Holocaust research organization (declining to specify the amount or charities) – only to find that several Jewish organizations, primarily Yad Vashem , wanted nothing to do with the money.
The auction house has since admitted the importance of engaging in transparent conversations about intergenerational wealth, a familiar topic in the nonprofit world, where museums and universities had to note the names of major donors and return their money. .
A two-row jadeite necklace with a Cartier diamond/white gold clasp that is detachable and wearable as a brooch; and jadeite/diamond ring from the Heidi Horten collection. Courtesy of Christie’s
“The Heidi Horten sale has highlighted the expectation that the market will broaden the lens through which we look at auction items,” said Christie’s executive Anthea Peers. restitution conference in London on June 20, “not only to research and document the history of ownership of the works themselves, but also to examine the very source of the wealth used to purchase them even though they were purchased in recent years , if this wealth was built during the Nazi era.
It remains to be seen how the trade would meet this expectation. How far back do you go? And who is off the list? It’s only a matter of time when Jeffrey Epstein’s art goes up for auction. Mick Flick, whose grandfather was convicted at Nuremberg, was one of the biggest buyers of contemporary art of his time. “We used to let him bid our auctions all the time,” the former auction manager said.
Heidi Goëss-Horten in front of a work by Francis Bacon in 2019. Photo Ouriel Morgensztern, ©Heidi Horten Collection.
What is clear is that the exam is not going away. The Holocaust Survivors Foundation USA, outspoken since the controversy began, said in a statement that the blowback “should send a clear message to all auction houses, museums and private collectors that every collection and every sale will be examined”.
The group, which lobbied the Tel Aviv Museum of Art to cancel Christie’s restitution event, remains unequivocal in its criticism of the auction house for what it sees as a whitewashing of the Nazi history of jewellery.
“Horten-Christie’s playbook of rewriting history to deny essential facts of the Holocaust, and even citing profiteers’ current ‘charitable purposes’, has been used time and time again by profiteers of the Holocaust. ‘Holocaust to avoid the responsibility that history and morality demand,’ David Schaecter, president of the foundation, said in a July 2 statement.
And while Schaecter praised the Tel Aviv Museum of Art for canceling the conference, at least one observer sees the gesture as meaningless – because the museum itself accepted a donation from German patrons whose wealth can be attributed to Nazi crimes against the Jewish people.
Nazi Billionaires author David De Jong, left, at his book launch in New York, 2022. Photo: Katya Kazakina
In the epilogue of his book Nazi billionaires, journalist David De Jong says he visited the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and noticed Ingrid Flick’s name carved in Hebrew on a wall. He could not believe his eyes. Ingrid Flick was the third wife of Friedrich Karl Flick, whose father was “the most powerful and ruthless of all German industrialists, who was condemned at Nuremberg and became Germany’s richest man in three eras different,” writes De Jong.
Ingrid Flick, who heads a foundation named after her late father-in-law, has donated more than €500,000 to the museum, according to De Jong.
“She never did any sort of reckoning with the Third Reich roots of her inherited fortune and her name is very prominently displayed in an Israeli museum,” De Jong told me by phone this week. “I find the hypocrisy of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art astounding. It’s not like the museum is taking its name off the lobby.
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