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

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

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."

It’s an understatement to say that Dudu follows her impulses. She decided to marry Hubertus after knowing him for two days. They met at a wedding in 1967 when both were seeing other people. After one date at a nightclub, he popped the question. "Here was this businessman, 10 years older, asking to marry me," Dudu says now. "I thought about it exactly two minutes. We’ve been together 40 years now, traveling the world."

The newlyweds drove in a Volkswagen from Munich to Beirut, where Hubertus was assigned by Hoechst, stopping in Istanbul along the way. The bazaars of Turkey were Dudu’s initiation into collecting. "It was the first time I entered a world I did not know," she says. "I realized I must have been a gypsy in 1500. You can leave me in a bazaar for days."

Once settled in Beirut, the couple took trips to Dubai, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi. In all these countries, she bought hand-painted silks, which today are draped across the backs of chairs and stuffed in drawers in her apartment. "I would see these Bedouin women, and we started trading things," says Dudu. "I would bring something European, and they were keen on that."

Beirut began a pattern of horrible timing. Invariably, the country where Hoechst sent them was either faltering economically, on the verge of civil war, under a repressive regime or all three. But such circumstances are good for buying beautiful things cheaply, and Dudu has never spent much money on her acquisitions, mostly made for the equivalent of hundreds of dollars or considerably less.

Istanbul was the couple’s next home, from 1971 until 1978. "Nobody collected," says Dudu. "The Turks were just trying to survive. I didn’t have the money to buy much, but the people in the bazaars were delighted with my eye. Sometimes they said, ‘Don’t pay. Just choose something.’ " Her constellation of 100-odd silver boxes, arranged on an end table, was largely acquired this way.

After Istanbul, they moved to Tehran, arriving in May 1978, during the last days of the Shah. As Iran’s political situation deteriorated, Hubertus and Dudu had the good sense to send their two sons to Germany in the care of their Turkish nanny. ("One of them is now a collector, but he won’t admit it," Dudu says.) Shortly afterward, Hubertus was taken into custody — Dudu uses the term "kidnapped" — for a month. "But they released him," she says. "This was in the beginning, before the time when they would just shoot you."

The authorities also confiscated some of Dudu’s art objects, including several tiny clay animals. "They’re now in the Tehran museum," she says — but she had a kind of collector’s revenge. "They were only copies. The people who took them thought they were real artifacts from 3000 B.C."

Having barely escaped alive from Iran, an exasperated Dudu begged Hubertus’s boss at Hoechst for a posting in a less-strife-torn locale. "Maybe could we live in Europe for once?" she recalls asking. The executive looked at them and said, "I have a place that will be paradise for you: Argentina."

They didn’t want to go. Argentina was hardly a break from their previous pattern: The country was heading into the Falklands War; its authoritarian military government was soon to fall; and various economic crises, including crippling inflation, lay ahead. But they went. And Buenos Aires, indeed South America generally, suited them, especially Dudu. She soon got a job at Sotheby’s, where she worked for five years in the department of Latin American art.

Up until the early 1990s, Hubertus continued to travel the world for his job. But Dudu began staying home more. When she visited her husband, she would, of course, seek out local artworks. She trekked to Brazil’s Bahia province to buy painted ceramic figurines, 30 of which grace a shelf in her kitchen, and to Montevideo, Uruguay, to pick up folk-art canvases for $200 a piece.

In the Philippines, she stumbled onto an abandoned chest containing 30 santos — carved, wooden religious figures jointed like marionettes — from the early 16th to the late 19th centuries, when the Spanish ruled the country. These now populate a tabletop in Hubertus’s half of their home.

These days the couple has a comfortable routine. In summer they retreat to the fashionable beach town of Punta del Este, Uruguay, where they have a compound formed of two adjacent houses (similar to their Buenos Aires arrangement), which they rented to Ralph Lauren last year. Buenos Aires is their home base for the high social season, and they make a long visit to family in Germany in August and September.

From any and all of these locales, Dudu pursues yet another sideline: publishing. With her friend Jean-Louis Larivière, her partner in Ediciones Larivière, she has produced a number of successful picture books. Their tome on the sprawling ranches of Argentina, Estancias Argentinas (co-published with Abbeville Press), has sold 40,000 copies so far, and a new edition is due out this year.

Dudu claims she is not focusing on collecting now. She has her plate full with myriad projects, such as helping to organize exhibitions of young Argentine painters abroad, like the one she curated at the Elisabethkirche in Berlin in 2004. "There’s no room for other art," she says, as if giving up the bottle was merely a matter of proximity to a liquor store.

In the next breath, though, she confides her plans to buy yet another apartment in her B.A. building. And she has just purchased a second seaside home in an even more remote Uruguayan town, because Punta del Este has become too crowded. How long before she fills these places with objects?

"She's Got to Have It" originally appeared in the July/August 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's July/August 2009 Table of Contents.