Just a few days after the opening of her art museum in downtown Vienna, the billionaire’s widow Heidi Goëss-Horten died unexpectedly yesterday. The Heidi Horten Collection confirmed that she died in the morning at her home in Maria Wörth in Carinthia. The 81-year-old was the sixth richest Austrian with assets of three billion euros. She inherited the property from her first husband, Helmut Horten.
She met the German department store owner, who is 32 years her senior, when she was 19 in a hotel bar in Velden. At that time she was working as a secretary for a cash register company in Vienna. The couple married in 1966. Together they laid the foundation for their extensive and top-class art collection in the 1970s.
her three marriages
After Helmut Horten died in 1987, his widow founded the Helmut Horten Foundation. In 1994 she married the French flower wholesaler Jean-Marc Charmat, from whom she divorced in 1998. In 2015 she married Karl Anton Goëss, whose surname she used as a double name. Besides art, ice hockey was her second passion. She has been honorary president of the ice hockey club KAC since 2010 and president since 2021. Half of the current general refurbishment of the Stadthalle Klagenfurt – home of the KAC – costs around 9.6 million euros. The renewed ice rink should bear her name, as General Manager Oliver Pilloni announced.
Large donations to the ÖVP
Horten also promoted political parties. In 2018 and 2019 she was the largest private donor to the ÖVP with 588,000 euros and 343,000 euros respectively. But she didn’t want to talk about it publicly: she refused so steadfastly to testify before the parliamentary Ibiza investigative committee that the MPs threatened to have her brought before her.
On the other hand, she was all the more devoted to art. She presented a large part of the collection for the first time in 2018 in an exhibition in the Leopold Museum, which attracted almost 360,000 visitors. According to the billionaire, this success resulted in the desire to make her collection permanently accessible to the public. In 2019 she announced her plans for her own museum in Vienna. The former Hanuschhof near the Albertina was found as a location, which finally opened on June 3rd with the first exhibition.
Opinion on Aryanization
To dispel rumors that Helmut Horten benefited from “Aryanization” during the founding phase of his department store empire, Horten published a report by historian Peter Hoeres at the beginning of this year. Accordingly, Helmut Horten did not create or exacerbate an emergency situation for Jewish business people. Although he was a beneficiary when he took over department stores from Jewish owners, he did not push the “Aryanization” forward.
Secretary of State for Culture Andrea Mayer (Greens) praised Horten as an “extremely interested art collector and self-confessed art lover”. Carinthia’s governor Peter Kaiser (SP) emphasized her sponsorship, for example for medicine, sport or animal welfare: “Heidi Goëss-Horten has done a lot for the state of Carinthia and its people.”
Source: Nachrichten
