Royal family makes Houston home
Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum when they were forced into exile in 1918.
Galitzine was born in Belgium in 1954 to a different life, with plenty of Habsburg circumstances but none of the pomp.
“We lived mostly in the present,” she said, telling her story from a comfortable, traditional living room in a River Oaks home she and her husband, the businessman Prince Piotr Galitzine, have rented for two years. Vases of fresh flowers, a birthday gift from her husband, filled several rooms.
At 61, she keeps her blond hair in a simple bob and has little use for makeup. She’s warm and welcoming.
The eldest child of Archduke Rudolf, she grew up in homes that were comfortable but never luxurious. She had a title — Archduchess — but learned early it was best not to throw her name around. It invited taunts, trouble and false friends.
Her real friends were dozens of Habsburg cousins with whom she romped happily during annual family gatherings near her uncle Otto’s small house by the sea in Spain, and later at the nunnery where Zita lived in Switzerland.
“Five or six were born the same year as me. Can you imagine the fun?” she said.
They were all expected to behave like royals. Their name implied a sense of duty, but they were not to use it for personal gain. They would have to prove themselves in spite of it.
They also were taught to love Austria even though a law prohibited them from visiting the homeland for many years.
“My grandmother, my father and all my uncles and aunts were never bitter against Austria or Austrians,” Galitzine said.
She knew her grandfather Charles died on the Portuguese island of Madeira in 1922 of pneumonia, at age 35, heartsick after failing to reclaim even the small Hungarian monarchy. She knew also her grandmother struggled for years to raise and educate her eight children as they migrated through Spain, Canada, the U.S. and Belgium, supported by well-connected friends and family.
Her immediate family history had drama of its own.
Galitzine’s father, born in Switzerland in 1919, had been captured by Nazis during World War II after parachuting into Austria as a resistance fighter. He leapt from a third-story window to escape, breaking an ankle and hobbling through a forest to a convent where nuns saved him.
Rudolph was a junior Wall Street executive when he met Xenia CzernichevBesobrasov in the early 1950s. She worked for Air France at a travel agency where he bought plane tickets. She was the Americanborn daughter of a czarist who emigrated to the U.S. after the Russian Revolution. Bishop Fulton Sheen officiated at their 1953 wed- ding in Tuxedo Park, N.Y., reported as the first imperial marriage in the U.S.
When Galitzine was 14, her mother died in a car crash that put Rudolf in the hospital for a year, “broken all over.” While her brothers stayed in boarding schools, she lived with relatives near Paris until she was 16. She felt lucky when her father married Princess Anna Gabriele von Wrede.
Tragedy returned in 1975, when a bus struck Galitzine’s 7-year old brother, Johannes, on his bicycle, killing him.
Galitzine said the family’s faith, along with deeply ingrained dignity, got them through it.
“My father always said I should set a good example because we came from a great family,” she said. “I thought that was a great lesson, and I try to follow it even now.”
She met Prince Piotr Galitzine in the most American of ways, at a New York bar.
He is descended from Russian aristocracy, not something she sought. “I am a bit of a rebel,” she said. “I didn’t like too much being a Habsburg. I wanted to be my own person.”
She earned a degree in economics. One night not long after taking a job on Wall Street, she went out with a group of Russian friends. “And there he was,” she said. They spoke in French. A mechanical engineer with a degree from M.I.T., he impressed her with his intelligence. She thought he seemed strong and reliable.
“I had no idea about his family, and I think he was not interested in my family at all. On the contrary,” she said. “I think if he had known in advance, he would have thought it was too much for him.”
They married in 1981, commuting on the train from Newark to their jobs as they started their family. Soon they embarked on a nomadic, upwardly mobile life: His career took them to California, then Luxembourg, then Moscow, where they spent 15 years as he helped the German pipe company Mannesmann enter the newly opened Russian market.
The Galitzines embraced Piotr’s culture, diplomatically naming their children for saints who predated the Orthodox split from Rome to satisfy her Catholic tradition as well. She likes to say she “specialized in children” during those years.
The Galitzines lived in Chicago a few years after Piotr was hired to lead North and South American operations for the global pipe-making firm TMK IPSCO. He brought the company to Houston in 2013.
Their financial success came because they worked hard, not because of their families, she said. “It’s just luck I was born a Habsburg.”
Three of their six children live in Houston, along with two young grandchildren. Dinners can be raucously multilingual: Piotr speaks only Russian to the children. She speaks French with her daughters and German with her sons, using the languages they were schooled in.
When she was 18, determined to see her family’s homeland, Galitzine snuck into the University of Innsbruck for a semester, using a passport with the name de Bar. She was finally able to visit legally the year after she was mar- ried, when her father finally won a long-waged petition with the government.
That enabled the elderly Zita to see Austria again, too.
When Zita died in 1989, at age 96, her family was allowed to bury her royally. At their own expense, the 20th-century Habsburgs staged a solemn procession in Vienna that was watched by millions on TV. A full orchestra and choir performed Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Requiem. Bells tolled at the Gothic St. Stephens Cathedral after a stately Mass.
Empress Zita’s casket sat atop an ornate black imperial catafalque loaned by the Museum at Schonbrunn Palace. An army of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren followed on foot. When pallbearers lead the casket to its final resting place in the royal crypt at Capuchin Church, they recited an ancient Habsburg ritual.
As they knocked on the crypt’s door to enter, an unseen warden replied, “Who comes?”
The pallbearers responded with Zita’s title.
“I do not know this person,” the warden said.
They knocked again, and again the warden wanted to know who sought entry. The pallbearers repeated Zita’s long name. Again, the warden refused to let them in.
Finally, after the third knock and question, came the answer that opened the door: “We come with the sinful mortal, our sister Zita.”
For Galitzine, it was a fitting end both for the austere grandmother she knew and for the quiet young empress depicted in a royal carriage 73 years earlier.
“It was a reminder that all the titles and all they had were nothing next to God,” she said.
She doesn’t expect other visitors to the Houston museum’s show to be so enamored with Éder’s minor painting, given galleries brimming with masterpieces by Titian, Caravaggio, Giorgione, Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Peter Rubens.
“It’s special to me because it’s people I knew,” she said. Little Otto’s ermine and gold brocade outfit is displayed beside it, along with ceremonial uniforms worn by attendants in the painting.
Galitzine also loves a family painting that hangs in her dining room. She inherited “Die Apotheose (The Allegory)” when her father died in 2010. She remembers chuckling over it with her brothers as they grew up. It conjures a victorious moment that never happened, glorifying the Emperor Franz-Joseph.
Art history has its place, Galitzine knows, but personal history has a richness of its own.
molly.glentzer@chron.com
The curators couldn’t contain their giddiness.
A colleague from Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum — one of at least nine helping to install “Habsburg Splendor” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — was unpacking Hans Holbein the Younger’s “Jane Seymour” from an elaborate crate, then peeling off strips of red tape that covered the glass of its frame.
Handlers had just hung Giorgione’s “The Three Philosophers,” from 1505.
“It’s in every art history book ever published,” said Gary Tinterow, the museum’s director. He was equally taken by Diego Velazquez’s “Infanta Maria Theresa, “from about 1653, and Guido Cagnacci’s “The Death of Cleopatra,” from about 1662.
“When I was a boy, that was on a well-thumbed page in the family library,” he said about the painting full of luminescent, topless women.
He couldn’t wait for the unpacking of Correggio’s 1532 “Jupiter and Io.”
“To me, it is one of the most astounding images in the history of art, the embodiment of a kiss,” he said.
The museum’s lead conservator, David Bomford, wanted to take home Carlo and Filippo Albacini’s tabletop sculpture “Elephant From the Ruins of Paestum.”
“Look at these amazing mermaids with bifurcated tails and these little cameos. It’s just this patinated bronze element … but the most exquisite table decoration,” he said.
Decorative arts curator Christine Gervais lusted after the early 18thcentury “Centerpiece for Sorbets,” a candelabralike object with small, dangling bowls and cameo portraits of Habsburg family members, all intricately carved from shells. It once held sorbets in the shape of fruits, the kind of outrageous dinner dish that got Marie Antoinette, the eldest daughter of Empress Maria Theresa, sent to the guillotine.
Helga Aurisch, the museum’s curator of European art, marveled at the 16th-century ceremonial armor of Charles V, with gold elements that could only have come from a family with New World resources. She loved a lavish 19th-century Hungarian ceremonial uniform, too. “The Hungarians were hard to please,” she said.
The show unfolds thematically and chronologically, taking visitors from a chivalrous period of armor and tapestries into rooms of ecclesiastical treasures, natural curiosities and masterpiece paintings from the Renaissance, Baroque and Romantic periods before finishing in a huge room of rarely seen court costumes from the Habsburg’s final century of power.
Life-size papier-mâché horse mannequins wear the sumptuously embroidered bridles in a central room starring a golden sleigh and a carriage from the 18th century. The carriage is one fancy behemoth — 17 feet long, weighing about 1,700 pounds.
“It’s the biggest, heaviest piece we have ever craned in,” Aurisch said. “Just to get it up here was remarkable. It came in by a smidgen.”
That was biggest nailbiter during two weeks of installation, after almost a year of logistical planning for the show.
Some of the carriage’s big glass windows, a technological feat of their time, broke during World War II when bombs landed near the Kunsthistorisches. Look for the original wavy ones; they’re as conspicuous a display of wealth as anything else in the show.
“Only somebody like the emperor could afford this,” Gervais said.
Molly Glentzer