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| Shared Passions |
The Art of the Baroness
Nancy Holmes
08/02/2004
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When Barcelona-born Carmen “Tita” Cervera married Baron Hans Heinrich
Thyssen-Bornemisza in 1985, she was well aware that Heini, as she called him,
possessed the largest private art collection in the world, a collection that
museums in over two dozen countries sought to inherit. (Even Disneyland made him
an offer.) Fourteen years before the baron’s death in 2002, he struck a deal
with the Spanish government that brought 700 paintings from his collection to
Madrid’s 18th-century Villahermosa Palace, which occupies a prominent corner
across from the Prado. The London Guardian attributed the baron’s choice to “the
pressure of the bedroom.” While Baroness Tita, Heini’s fifth wife and the only
one who truly shared his passion for art, was positively ecstatic over the idea
of sending the collection to her native land, it is also true that no other
suitor came close to matching Spain’s generous terms, which included renovating
the Villahermosa at the government’s expense.
TOP VIEW
A lifelong love of art brought Baron Hans Heinrich
Thyssen-Bornemisza and his wife, Carmen “Tita” Cervera, together. Finding and
perfecting a home for the baron’s collection, the world’s largest private
portfolio of artwork, became her life’s mission. In the end, her own collection
found a home alongside her husband’s in her native Spain. |
Tita, a former Miss Barcelona,
Miss Spain and Miss World, and former wife of Tarzan actor Lex Barker, knew
nothing of art when she met the baron, but proved to be a quick study. She spent
the years of their marriage closely involved in every aspect of buying, selling,
trading, culling, showing and traveling the world for and with the
multibillion-dollar collection. It should come as no great surprise that she
established an adjacent exhibition space for her own acquisitions, the Carmen
Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, in two buildings overlooking the gardens of the
Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum. In a recent conversation, the baroness told Worth
what it has taken to create an art museum of her own.
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