Elizabeth Taylor is relegated to the ranks: Heidi Goëss-Horten's jewellery collection, which comprises hundreds of treasures, set a new record at its auction by Christie's in Geneva: 196 million dollars, including the buyer's premium, were sold for the jewellery of the "department store queen" and art collector, who died last June. This makes it the most expensive private jewelry collection ever auctioned in the world. Until now, the contents of Elizabeth Taylor's eminent jewelry box had held the record: In 2011, it fetched almost 116 million dollars gross at an auction in New York – and was surrounded by the glamour of the screen diva.
Ursula Scheer
Editor in the feuilleton.
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The Swiss auction series "The World of Heidi Horten", on the other hand, did not seem very brilliant despite its financial strength: where the wealth of the collector, whose greatest passion beyond jewelry was to build up her art collection, came from, aroused outrage, especially in the United States. Helmut Horten, Heidi Horten's first husband, had profited from the fact that Jewish entrepreneurs had to sell their companies when building up his department store empire during the Nazi era. Christie's seemed to want to quietly ignore this aspect of its event at first, until protests were raised.
The American Jewish Committee and the Simon Wiesenthal Center demanded that the auction be halted until "serious efforts" were made to investigate the source of Horten's assets. The Holocaust Educational Trust also spoke out against the event. In fact, even before her death, Heidi Horten had commissioned historian Peter Hoeres to investigate the business practices of her late first husband under National Socialism.
The result: Horten was a profiteer of the Nazi regime. Heidi Horten never commented publicly on the matter. Christie's online sales catalog now states that a "significant portion" of the proceeds from the auction will go to Holocaust research and educational projects on the genocide of the Jews. From the outset, the auction house had announced that the proceeds would go to the "Heidi Horten Collection", the collector's private museum, and other charitable causes.