The Sale of the Century

The Von Hirsch collection stirs a buying storm

"I want people to love and fight for my things just the way I did."

--Art Collector Robert von Hirsch

And fight they did. For what the London auction house of Sotheby Parke Bernet billed as the "sale of the century," dealers, museum directors and assorted collectors from all over the world converged on the British capital to join in a buying spree whose force startled even the more jaded veterans of the polished world of high-priced art. To be sure, nothing like the colossal 700-work collection of medieval ivories and enamels, old master paintings and drawings, Renaissance sculpture and impressionist paintings amassed by onetime German Leather Manufacturer Robert von Hirsch was likely to come on the block soon again. But, even so, the long awaited sale was a stunner. By week's end, with Von Hirsch's collection of impressionist paintings still to be sold, the orders on Sotheby's books totaled a stupendous $22.9 million. By the time the auction concludes this week, the final take is expected to hit $35 million --far beyond the $25 million Sotheby's originally projected.

Before the auction, thousands of visitors, including the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret, strolled through the exhibition rooms to see the collection. When Sotheby's chairman and chief auctioneer Peter Wilson pounded his small ivory hammer to begin the sale, 400 buyers filled the firm's chandeliered main auction salon; closed-circuit television brought the auction to four smaller rooms and the nearby Westbury Hotel ballroom for the overflow. As Wilson proceeded to knock down one record price after another, the dizzying figures were flashed on an electronic board above him in pounds, U.S. dollars, French francs, Italian lire, West German deutsche marks, Japanese yen and Swiss francs.

U.S. Actor Jack Nicholson put in a successful bid of $7,728 for a Tiepolo chalk sketch. French Idol Alain Delon also bid on old master drawings, but came away emptyhanded. "The prices were very high," he said. "Not too high for me, but for the pictures." When Zurich Dealer Walter Feilchenfeldt, bidding for a German museum, paid $1,177,600 for a small watercolor by Albrecht Dtirer, reporters asked if he had not gone overboard. He answered coolly: "It went more or less according to plan." Said Sherman Lee, director of the Cleveland Museum of Art:

"The major items would probably have fetched the same prices if they had been offered to 40 dealers in a room, but the prices of all the other pieces get swept along during a sale like this." Lee himself swept down $294,000 for a Rembrandt drawing, setting another record.

Many of the finest works went to German museums eager to recover treasures from the German past and take up the Bonn government on its offer to foot half the cost of their purchases. The State Museum in Berlin paid the top price of the auction: $2,214,000 for a gleaming Mosan medallion made in A.D. 1150 for the Abbey of Stavelot in Belgium. On behalf of the Nuremberg art museum, a London dealer paid $2,029,500 for another 12th century enamel, an arm ornament made for Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa's coronation robe.

Almost lost in the flying millions was the memory of the man responsible. Born in Frankfurt in 1883, Von Hirsch began working at the turn of the century in the Offenbacher leather firm owned by his uncle. He eventually built it into one of the finest such companies in Europe. (The Grand Duke of Hesse enabled him to add the aristocratic von to his name by making him a baron.) Von Hirsch bought his first painting, a Toulouse-Lautrec, in 1907, and about that time also picked up a canvas dated 1901 by a 26-year-old Spaniard named Pablo Picasso. It was in the 1920s and early '30s, however, that Von Hirsch assembled his medieval collection. In 1933, as the political climate in Germany grew ugly, Von Hirsch, a Jew, moved across the Swiss border to Basel. He won permission to take his collection with him on condition he turn over to the German government Lucas Cranach's painting, The Judgment of Paris. After the war, it was returned to him still bearing the label, THE PROPERTY OF REICHSMAR-SCHALL GOERING. Von Hirsch gave it to the Kunstmuseum in Basel.

By then, he had developed both the taste and the wherewithal needed to build a great personal collection. Art lovers regularly called at his Swiss villa. If they were lucky, there was a sumptuous lunch and good conversation, and then a stroll through the spacious gardens adjoining the mansion.

Many expected that the villa, the gardens and the collection might all be turned into a museum. But for Von Hirsch collecting was a magnificent obsession. Thus before he died last November at the age of 94, he set aside a few personal bequests and then decreed that the rest be sold in order to give others a chance to vie for the treasures that nowadays are rarely seen outside museums.

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