Andrew Graham-Dixon on an exhibition of works from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
BARON THYSSEN-BORNEMISZA, painted by Lucian Freud, looks a worried man. Maybe the insurance premiums on his art collection have finally got to him; maybe it's the influence of the artist, who generally makes his sitters look anxious, uneasy. Behind the Baron, Freud includes a detail from Wattcau's Pierrot Content, one of 53 pictures currently on show in "Old Master Paintings from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection".
Strategically placed in the anteroom to the exhibition, Freud's painting asks a pertinent question. Why are you here? To see a bunch of fine Old Master paintings, normally kept under wraps in the Villa Favorita? Or to focus on their possessor, to draw conclusions about the heart and mind of the owner from the objects that he owns?
It's hard to work out much about Thyssen from his Old Masters. For a start, this is not the collection of one man but two, the present Baron and his father. The father tended to specialise in painting of the Northern Renaissance, but even within this relatively specialised area there is little evidence of what you could describe as a genuinely personal taste.
You get Durer's magnificent, harsh Christ Among the Doctors, in which a plumpish infant Christ, counting on his fingers the reasons why he is right and they are wrong, puts a gaggle of gnarled, caricatured sophists to shame. The focus is all on the hands: Christ's are elegant, the embodiment of His divine reason; placed at the dead centre of the compo-sition, they are in stark contrast to the doctors' knotted, misshapen mitts. It's a great painting, and best left as that, rather than as part of a collector's vision. There is little point in searching for a logic to connect it with Hans...
