Former refugee’s treasures for sale
AS A young boy Felix Rohatyn and his family fled the Nazis in Europe, surviving by using gold coins he had hidden in a toothpaste tube. Nearly eight decades after he arrived in the United States, aged 14, the opulent art collection curated by him and his wife is to be sold at a series of auctions by Sotheby’s this year. 1740-41
Mr Rohatyn, who died last year aged 91, was a banker who became known as “the man who saved New York” for his role in dealing with the city’s debts in the late 1970s. He later became US ambassador to France from 1997 to 2000, and was named a Grand Officier in France’s Legion of Honour.
Much of the collection celebrates the Rohatyns’ love of France and French culture. It includes Old Masters and Impressionist paintings as well as more modern works. There are also two views of Venice, by Canaletto and Bellotto. George Wachter, Sotheby’s chairman and worldwide co-chairman of Old Master Paintings, said: “The works in the collection converse with one another across different time periods and styles with the sophistication, refinement and elegance that Ambassador and Mrs Felix Rohatyn embodied themselves.”
Mr Rohatyn made his fortune working for investment bankers Lazard in New York, which he joined after a physics degree, working in his father’s brewery in Paris and serving in the US army during the Korean war. Later he recalled: “My stepfather knew Andrew Meyer, who was a senior partner of Lazard Frères and said, ‘Listen I have a step son and he’s not very bright, but could you give him a job for a year or something?’.” He was there for 40 years.
He was a long-time supporter of the Israel Museum. In 1984 he told the New York Times Magazine: “I didn’t want to become emotionally involved with Israel. I disagreed on many levels with the Begin government. But you can’t go to Jerusalem without getting involved. The people are extraordinary. And that is a wonderful museum. . . In general, I do enough things in my life to feel perfectly content at the notion that I may never do more.’’
His family had escaped from France via Morocco and Portugal to Brazil and then to the US. In 2009 he learned their visas were issued by the Brazilian diplomat Luis Martins de Souza Dantas.
“If I hadn’t got those visas, I would have seen the gas chamber in Auschwitz,” said Mr Rohatyn.
I didn’t want to become emotionally involved with Israel
Antoine Watteau, two studies of elegant men, one standing, the other kneeling, c1715. This photo: Canaletto, Grand Canal: The Rialto Bridge From The South, c1730s