Rebel With A Cause, Times Magazine
A Thyssen by birth, an archduchess by marriage, former wildchild Francesca von Habsburg gets serious with her new art foundation in Dubrovnik .
Francesca von Habsburg has just made her boldest move yet launching her own contemporary art foundation in Dubrovnik, Croatia, thereby signalling to the world at large that she intends to become a collector to be reckoned with. This is no small step if you are the daughter of the late Baron Hans-Heinrich Thyssen- Bornemisza, whose world-famous art collection is now housed in the Villa Hermosa in Madrid, presided over by his formidable widow Tita. Von Habsburg’s plan is to create a 21st-century collection of new media works and sculpture — effectively bringing her father’s life's work into the contemporary era. A recent action-packed weekend with carefully chosen global art experts and enthusiasts celebrated the opening of her exhibition, Brightness; not a bad description of the direction her life has taken.
Francesca von Habsburg combines two great family dynasties, the Thyssen- Bornemiszas, one of Europe’s richest industrial fortunes, and the Habsburgs, through her 1993 marriage to Karl von Habsburg, Archduke of Austria, eldest son of Otto von Habsburg and grandson of the last emperor. If the Habsburgs still ruled an empire, Von Habsburg would be empress-in-waiting. Instead, she is building an art empire of her own, following in the footsteps of her father (and of his father and grandfather before that). Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza was one of the most important collectors of the 20th century. But he didn't just collect, he also organised ground-breaking exhibitions all over the world, recognising that cultural ties enhance understanding between countries. This strategy lies close to Von Habsburg' heart, and she is set to follow it in her own way. "'It is a collection in its infancy," she writes in the catalogue accompanying the opening exhibition, "and its development and strength lies in my endless curiosity for art and its meaning and presence in our lives."
Curated by Von Habsburg with London-based art dealer Max Wigram, Brightness under- lines the new foundations mission to develop site. specific projects, particularly in Croatia, with contemporary artists. The exhibition was installed in Dubrovnik’s Museum of Modern Art, an imposing quasi-medieval palace built in the Thirties as a summer Villa for shipowner Bozo Banac. Stepping into a courtyard, guests arrived at the launch party via a stone staircase sweeping up to the vast first-floor terrace, overlooking the Adriatic bathed in moonlight. Von Habsburg, a redhead dressed casually in white trousers, gypsy top and straw hat, walked around the high-ceilinged rooms, intoxicated with seeing her works installed together for the first time. "It's important that you buy works you feel strongly about, that move you," she says. "This is an experience I never understood before: my father often walked around his gallery in Lugano, and I saw the thrill he got. He used to be six inches off the ground.”
Francesca von Habsburg with Angela Bulloch's light box
“I realised very quickly how helpful the family name was. But it is a double edged sword.”
"That's exactly how I felt last night," she says the following day, when I interviewed her aboard her chartered yacht, moored just off Dubrovnik.
Brightness explores goodness and beauty in a dysfunctional society; the works reflect 21st-century preoccupations such as angst, adventure, isolation, and Slick surfaces, and there is something poignant about placing them in such a timeless setting. It is the first time that most of these artists have been shown in Dubrovnik, a city with a dazzling artistic heritage, which now needs to look forward.
"l want to help Dubrovnik become the metropolis it once was," says Antun Maracic, the museumg director. There's no better person than Von Habsburg to rejuvenate the city, which she fell in love with ten years ago. Back then she was helping to restore artworks destroyed by the 1991-92 war there through her foundation ARCH (Art Restoration for Cultural Heritage). Von Habsburg wants to keep this type of work going alongside her collecting, which has now taken centre stage. "She’s interested in work that has a technological element in it." says Wigram. "Francesca’s never really in one place for more than two or three days, and I think she's interested in this central theme of who you are, where you are, and how complicated that awareness can be."
The exhibition included 30 works by artists, including Darren Almond, Phillippe Bradshawe, Candice Breitz, Angela Bulloch and Olafur Eliasson, all of whom came to Dubrovnik for the opening. There were large-scale photographs by Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky, a single video by Julian Opie, a multi-channel installation by Pipilotti Rist and rooms given over to Bulloch's light and music box and Breitz's Diorama of TV monitors, playing the soap Dallas, scattered among furniture. The furniture is actually Von Habsburg’s, bought from the local Hotel Argentina, which prior to a major refurbishment was famous for its involuntary Seventies chic. "I bought it a year ago and made it available for the piece," she says. "Candice [Breitz] selected it and now its immortalised for ever."
The most impressive installation was Eliasson's, a cool blue space reflecting colour and light in shimmery waves. challenging the viewers sense of perspective. Eliasson, whose commission for London's Tate Modern opens next month, is hot in the art world, and it is a testament to Von Habsburg's vision that she owns five of his pieces already and has just commissioned a sixth. "She's got a great eye and an absolutely astonishing visual memory," says Wigram, whom Von Habsburg credits with having given her focus, confidence and introductions to new artists.
Collaborating with artists and becoming involved in their projects is her passion and the major reason for creating the foundation. In an age where new private museums are mushrooming all over the place — often individual vanity projects — Von Habsburg’s initiative seems different, an outcome of a life lived with beautiful things surrounding her. "I always want to try to meet artists and if I can't, I pick up the phone and speak to them," she says. "From a collector’s point of view that is the most interesting part, to have a personal insight into their work. talk to them about it. commission them, see how they react to certain challenges you propose." Artists like being in prestigious collections, and her name opens doors. "I realised very quickly how helpful the Thyssen- Bornemisza name was. But it is a double-edged sword It is a very big challenge for me.
I have to live up to a certain standard."
Her foundation is based in Vienna, but she plugs into a central Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection office in Zurich for Overall administration. She is clever at harnessing the right people to give her advice: the advisory board of her foundation includes Peter Weibel, director of the ZKM in Karlsruhe; Norman Rosenthal. head of exhibitions at the Royal Academy: Simon de Pury of Phillips, de Pury and Luxembourg; and Gloria von Thurn und Taxis. She avoids those who. in her words, “want to take rich people on shopping sprees, and act like their personal dressers”.
It is as if she can finally admit that she inherited her father’s genes — something she could not acknowledge in his own lifetime when being a collector was his domain. Watching her with her guests, she is very like her father, charismatic and impatient. mingling with a crowd only she could have rustled up, of artists, art devotees and cultural globetrotters, rather than socialites This was a conscious move, to show her serious intent.
“It’s a mini-top art event,” Rosenthal tells me at a dinner after the private view. He has known Von Habsburg for 20 years. "Her driving ambition is that the Thyssen collection doesn't stagnate. She feels she is a Thyssen as much as her father and grandfather."
Behind that statement lie years of struggle to carve out a place for herself in a family divided by power, money and divorce. Her marriage to Von Habsburg gave her the security she craved, and three children, Eleonore. 9, Ferdinand, 6, and Gloria, 4, with whom she lives between Salzburg and Vienna. But her own family has had a history of infighting. Her father was a man of extremes, with a £1.7 billion fortune, a great art collection, four ex-wives and five children. In February last year, a milestone was reached with the resolution of a huge family lawsuit. just before Baron Thyssen’s death last April. It was initiated by the Baron in 1999, alleging that his son Heini, his eldest child by his first wife, owed him money. The lawsuit attracted widespread attention — due to the vast sums of money and the characters involved.
Since the settlement, the lives of Von Habsburg and the other four children have moved forward. There are now two seats on the board of 12 trustees of the Thyssen- Bornemisza Museum in Madrid that represent the interests of the children — Von Habsburg has one and Rosenthal the other. It is a major victory for her. "We have rights of veto on important issues. That’s very important. We can't just shift the foundation's emphasis or name."
Von Habsburg’s greater involvement in her father's collection follows a truce with her stepmother Tita, the Baron’s fifth and last wife, with whom she has a complex relationship. Being a Thyssen looked great from the outside, but came at a high price. It has taken her until now — she is 45 — to strike a balance between the two dynasties she is part of, without losing track of who she is herself.
Von Habsburg was born in Switzerland in 1958, to 24-year-old Fiona Thyssen and 32- year-old "Heini", as the Baron was called by his friends. A former model, the Scots-born Fiona Campbell-Walter recalls seeing Heini for the first time in St Moritz in the Fifties: "I'll never forget seeing this extraordinary man standing there with a cigarette holder, wearing a Guatemalan green cotton shirt with an embroidered eagle on his back. He was tremendously elegant, and handsome as the devil." Fiona became Heini’s third wife in 1956, marrying him at the Villa Favorita on Lake Lugano in Switzerland, the legendary villa and home of the collection, until its move to Madrid in 1993 Von Habsburg and her younger brother, Lorne, 40, a film-maker, were brought up at the Villa Favorita as well as in St Moritz and Jamaica, where the family had a house which she now owns and visits often. Called "Chessie" by her friends, she went to Le Rosey boarding school in Switzerland, and then to St Martins for two years. It was the beginning of her wild years, with a career in modelling, giving brilliant parties and dating exotic men.
Interestingly, her father much preferred her naughty than nice, perhaps because he had a certain notoriety, "and used it to be outspoken", she says. "We'd go out to Annabel’s and I dressed outrageously, and he thought it was funny," Von Habsburg recalls. "When I changed and moved into his territory, the stepmothers never felt comfortable with that."
Nonetheless, she moved back to the Villa Favorita after several years in London, and worked for her father as a curator. It was a turning point in her life. The Baron signed a loan agreement in 1982 with what was then the USSR, the first of its kind, which started a series of large-scale exhibitions, all collaborations between Russian museums and the Villa Favorita. In each exhibition, 40 works were given by the Baron, and 40 by the Russians, negotiated piece by piece. In pre-glasnost and pre-museum blockbuster days, the Baron forged links through cultural diplomacy previously unheard of. The first exhibition was Impressionist pictures, including the extraordinary holdings by the Hermitage of Matisse and Picasso: 400,000 visitors came to see the show at the Villa Favorita, and 75,000 copies of the catalogue were sold.
"He [Baron Thyssen] was a real pioneer," says Simon de Pury, who was then the collections chief curator. "The fact that Brezhnev was in power, the fact that some of the most important pictures from Soviet state museums were shown in the private home of one of the world’s major capitalists — that was a massive statement."
Conversely, the Thyssen-Bornemisza pictures, including Old Masters, went to places such as Moscow, Leningrad (now St Petersburg), Novosibirsk (capital of Siberia), and Kiev. "He saw his collection as easing the tension between East and West," says de Pury, "a peace mission." Now de Pury sees a direct line from father to daughter. ”Heini’s motto was, 'You've got to work hard and play hard.' Even if he partied all night, he was at his desk, razor-sharp, by 7am." Francesca has a similar work and fun combination, and she also sees herself as a cultural ambassador." There is one crucial difference, though. The Baron never really engaged with living artists, preferring to collect dead artists, where, in de Pury’s words, "You could judge them entirely on their own merit." There is one exception: his magnificent portrait painted by Lucian Freud, whom the Baron came to admire. Even the many sittings that Freud demands became a refuge from Thyssen’s busy life.
Von Habsburg is different because she has always been plugged in to youth culture and contemporary urban life, whereas her father lived a rarefied existence. "I went to the first Sex Pistols concert," she proudly tells me. De Pury helped her to shape a strategy for the future, as he felt the glory days of the Villa Favorita could not be recaptured, but that she should do something radical. Von Habsburg also has projects on the island of Lopud, near Dubrovnik, where she is restoring a Franciscan monastery. She talks of Richard Serra doing a piece for the island, and the architect Zaha Hadid is also on her wish-list.
Lopud and Dubrovnik are for keeps in a life that is otherwise on the move. "I made a commitment to myself that I would find something as beautiful as Lugano, a place which inspires me as much as Lugano inspired my father," she says. Although she misses him, she feels liberated, "freer to do the things I want to do. I don't obsess over having a attention, always looking for my father's approval, trying to make him proud of me. I have started being more the person that I am."
She says she wants to slow down, but it is hard to believe her. After ten years in Salzburg, she plans to spend more time in Vienna. "Karl likes to be quiet in the countryside, but I am more interested in being in a town." It's also a better nerve centre for her work. Her apartment in the first district has an exhibition space. She is on the international board of MAK, Vienna’s museum of applied arts, and is thinking of continuing her design studies, started at St Martins all those years ago. "I would like to describe myself as a philanthropist," she says. "I want to keep building, keep creating, keep learning keep making a few mistakes, and hopefully learn from them."