Art: Otto’s Treasure

In Vienna last week there was talk of only one thing, that Archduke Otto, 21-year-old exiled pretender to the Austrian Throne, was about to inherit a greater fortune than any other man of 1934. For a week Duke Maximilian von Hohenberg, the assassination of whose father, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, set off the World War in 1914, had been conferring with onetime Chancellor Otto Ender about the restoration of Habsburg properties confiscated during revolution. Last week their plans were well under way. To Otto, as head of the house, will go Habsburg jewels and plate, Habsburg stockholdings, most of which have been made valueless by Depression. But the treasure which is to make him rank with Mellon is Vienna’s famed Kunsthistorisches (Art History) Museum, the Louvre of Vienna.

If Otto ever gets a chance to walk into his museum, he will be able to see art works dating from an Egyptian 1900 B. C. tomb to paintings of the 18th Century Dutch School. He will be able to boast of his collections of Dürer, Rembrandt, Holbein, Rubens, Velasquez, and the world’s finest Breughels. He may point to his Raphael Madonna as one of the world’s very best. In one of his armor rooms, the finest save for Madrid’s, he will see ancient Turkish bridles and reins studded with emeralds the size of walnuts. He will be able to handle the only absolutely authenticated Cellini in the world— an exquisite ebony, gold, and enamel saltcellar.

To this fabulous gift there were bound to be strings. Otto will have to keep his museum open to the public. And, since it is unlikely that he will be allowed to sell or borrow against his museum’s collections, his new-found wealth will remain largely titular. But that Archduke Otto had every intention of collecting in person was made evident last week in a letter he wrote to the peasant villages of Edelsgrub and Premstaetten, which recently made him an honorary citizen. Announcing again his desire to return from exile to Austria, he wrote:

“As soon as the frontiers are opened to me, I shall return without bitterness. I have suffered under the injustice done to our house, but neither my father, the late Emperor, my mother nor myself has blamed the Austrian people. … I salute you all in the hope of returning soon.”