Heidi Horten

Heidi Horten (née Jelinek; 13 February 1941 – 12 June 2022) was an Austrian billionaire and art collector. She was the widow of businessman Helmut Horten, whose wealth was famously rooted in Nazi profiteering. In May 2020 Forbes estimated her net worth at US$3.0 billion.

Biography Horten inherited her wealth upon the death of her husband, the founder of the German department store business Horten AG.

Art collection Horten amassed an art collection of over 500 works, which included paintings by Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, Georg Baselitz, and Yves Klein. In 2018, 170 works from the Heidi Horten Collection were exhibited at Leopold Museum in Vienna.

In 2019, Horten announced plans to open a private museum, having bought a 155-year-old, mansion in Vienna to house the collection. the museum opened to the public in 2022.

Following Horten's death, her jewellery collection was auctioned by Christie's in May 2023. The auction set a record for the most valuable single collection of jewels, fetching million (million). Following controversy over the source of the Horten fortune, Christie's announced that a portion of the proceeds would be contributed to Holocaust education and related causes. On 31 August 2023, Christie's cancelled the auction entirely after Jewish charities and organizations refused to accept any moneys related to the sale.