She's Got to Have It

Photo by Miguel Flores-Vianna

Peripatetic collector Dudu von Thielmann has crisscrossed the globe in pursuit of diverse treasures that fill every corner of her Buenos Aires home.

Luis Gonzalez Palma Caio Fonseca

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Saying that Dudu von Thielmann collects things is like saying that the sun shines — collecting is her animating purpose, the reason she gets up in the morning, and the last thing she thinks about before going to bed.

A resident of Buenos Aires who has lived all over the world, Dudu is 63, and she looks her age, except in her eyes, which are a sparkly blue. Her favorite phrases are "You have no idea!" and "You cannot believe it!" Delivered in a German accent, they are generally deployed in telling a friend (she seemingly has thousands) about some exciting new art object she has discovered.

Over the past 40 years, and with the grudging approval of her husband, Hubertus, Dudu (real name: Gudrun) has amassed about 800 representations of hands. The pieces, spanning several centuries and made of ivory, wood, stone and silver, as well as other metals, are often emblazoned with an eye in the palm, a protective symbol in some cultures. She keeps many of them tucked beneath a layer of glass atop her coffee table. The Jeu de Paume, in Paris, wanted to feature them in an exhibition, "but the trauma of losing them would be too much," says Dudu.

She struggles to find spots for all the objects she buys. That is one of the reasons she combined two apartments in the Argentine capital, connected only by their terraces. Essentially, Dudu and Hubertus have one place each, with separate maids — a typically odd but workable arrangement.

On the coffee table in her half of their home is a large Buddha’s hand in metal and wood from Cambodia, one of the dozen countries in which she has obsessively quested for art. In context, the open palm seems to be a "voilà" gesture inviting visitors to appreciate the riot of treasures that fill the room.

Beyond her collection of hands, Dudu owns thousands of pieces of folk art, mostly from various South American countries and the Philippines, as well as any number of textiles, masks, ceramic figurines, hand-painted trays, representations of pigs, cushions, metal boxes and other items that have struck her fancy. And although not a conventional contemporary-art collector, she has ended up with several estimable examples of the category.

One, a large abstraction by the acclaimed American painter Caio Fonseca, is displayed over her fireplace. Dudu first spotted the piece in the early 1990s on a visit to New York’s SoHo. "It was $9,000. So much money!" she says. Too much for her. But not, it turned out, for a wealthy friend she counseled in collecting. Years later when this friend wanted to give her a present, Dudu asked for the Fonseca, and he obliged. By then it cost $50,000; it is now worth around $100,000. She also has photographs by Luis González Palma, famous for his sepia-tinted images of native peoples, and the Latin pop sensation Marcos López, whose large depiction of a taxi driver with his penis hanging out of his pants hangs over Dudu’s bed.

She has never shied away from shock value in art or life — indeed, she thrives on it. One evening at a book party held for a friend of hers at La Ideal, the famous Buenos Aires restaurant and tango venue, Dudu pulled out of her purse a spiky black punk wig shot through with strands of red tinsel and put it on. One of the guests said what everyone was thinking: "Oh, Dudu!"

Dudu’s prodigious collecting is the product of a perfect confluence of biographical influences. A childhood spent partly in a castle near Munich endowed her with a social ease and sense of entitlement that charm objects out of people’s hands; coming of age in 1968 in Europe, when rebellion was de rigueur, has made her seek out unusual categories of art; and 25 years moving around the globe with Hubertus, a frequently re-posted executive for the German multinational Hoechst, has given her access to material she never would have found by staying put.

"The places we have lived inspired her," says Hubertus, now retired from the corporate world and a well-regarded German novelist (his work has not been translated into English yet). "She has seen so much." As for the possibility that he might also have acquired a few things along the way, he looks around him, one eyebrow raised, and says dryly, "You can’t have two collectors in a family."