Lord Weidenfeld GBEA Life of Ideals and Ideas An Introduction by Dr John Adamson As with most things he essayed in the course of his very long life, George Weidenfeld – Lord Weidenfeld of Chelsea (1919-2016) – took to collecting with a combination of gusto and purpose. The gusto was short-lived but concentrated, applied chiefly in the 1960s and 1970s, when the bulk of the collection was assembled. The purpose was consistent and enduring. As publisher, philanthropist and networker extraordinaire, George Weidenfeld used his collection and the riverside apartment that housed it as a stage set for an extraordinarily glamorous professional and social life, which, for the best part of half a century, made his household the successor of the great European political and literary salons of the nineteenth-century. Here, politicians, ambassadors and plutocrats would sit down to dinner with playwrights, academics, and musicians: the President of the Royal Society next to a bejewelled New York society grande dame; a celebrated author beside a German media billionaire. Through their host’s charm and persuasiveness, almost all ended up being involved in some way in Weidenfeld’s philanthropic grands projets: for scholarship schemes, lecture programmes, conferences, think-tanks, literary prizes, even an entire new School of Government for Oxford – almost all of them ultimately brought to fruition.George Weidenfeld was born in Vienna in September 1919, just ten weeks after the signing of the Versailles Peace Treaty that had dismembered the Austro-Hungarian Empire and formally ended the ‘Great War’. His youth was dominated by the consequences of that First World War, just as his adult life was to be shaped by the consequences of the Second. The only son of Jewish parents, of illustrious rabbinic descent but modest means, Weidenfeld grew up in a politically volatile Vienna, a city where Communist gangs brawled in the streets with Fascist thugs, but which was simultaneously one of the greatest cultural capitals of Europe: the Vienna of Freud and Wittgenstein, Richard Strauss and Stefan Zweig. From his parents, Weidenfeld acquired fluency in English, French, Italian and Latin, as well as his native German (spoken, throughout his life, in the elegant Viennese accent of the 1920s), and a deep love, and encyclopaedic knowledge, of European culture in all its forms. They also imparted one thing more: a sense of who he was, as the scion of a Jewish intellectual aristocracy, that endowed the young Weidenfeld with an adamantine inner self-confidence and rendered him, throughout his career, impervious to antisemitism and snobbery alike. Weidenfeld’s chosen career had been diplomacy, and he had joined the Vienna Konsular-Akademie (a university-level training school for future diplomats) in his late teens. But the Anschluss of June 1938, whereby Hitler incorporated Austria into the ‘Greater German Reich’, ended any chance of diplomatic employment, and, as he also soon realized, placed him and his parents at mortal risk. By the end of that summer, he had obtained an entry visa for Britain, where, with timely if unexpected assistance from members of an English Protestant sect, the Plymouth Brethren, his parents were soon able to join him.Within a year of his arrival, Weidenfeld joined the BBC Overseas Service. His high intelligence and formidable linguistic skills quickly made him a mainstay of the department producing wartime counter-propaganda, where his colleagues included George Orwell and Richard Crossman. One early assignment had the young Weidenfeld posing as a disgruntled Italian infantryman to present a weekly broadcast to Mussolini’s forces in North Africa, delivered – completely convincingly – in the Roman equivalent of a Cockney accent. His talents soon, however, found more sophisticated employment. He was seconded to high-level liaison on behalf of the British government with the numerous London-based governments-in-exile, a role that brought him, still in his twenties, into personal contact with a series of post-war European leaders: Tito, De Gaulle, and Churchill among them. These wartime contacts helped determine the trajectory of Weidenfeld’s subsequent career. A chance encounter with the Eton-educated former Grenadier Guards officer, Nigel Nicolson – son of the Bloomsbury Group celebrities, Harold Nicholson and Vita Sackville-West – led to the creation of the publishing house of Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 1949. Nicolson’s aristocratic social contacts provided the initial finance, while Weidenfeld’s political and intellectual networks supplied most of the early authors. The firm rapidly acquired a reputation for the exceptional literary and intellectual quality of its writers, and its publicity-savvy eye for publishing coups. Among the early successes were the historical works of Eric Hobsbawm and Hugh Trevor-Roper, the novels of Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of memoirs by internationally famous statesmen, among them Adenauer, De Gaulle, Wilson and Kissinger – almost all of them courted extensively, in the period prior to signing, at dinner parties in Cleeve Lodge near Hyde Park in the 1960s, and later in the magnificent apartment Weidenfeld created in London during the 1970s, with the advice of the decorator and antique dealer Geoffrey Bennison, at 9 Chelsea Embankment. The apartment functioned as a twentieth-century riff on the theme of the seventeenth-century princely court. Perhaps not coincidentally, the painting that dominated his drawing room, the largest in Weidenfeld’s collection, is a depiction of a ceremony at the Habsburg court: a baptism in the Chapel of the Vienna Hofburg, teeming with courtiers and clerics (Lot 538). The apartment, with its lofty ceilings and pictures closely hung, more resembled the piano nobile of an Italian baroque palace than the residence of an adoptively British businessman. Paintings, drawings, and a magnificent tapestry (Lot 518) – made by John Vanderbank, master weaver and Chief Arras Worker to Queen Anne – lined such wall-space as was not already clad, floor-to-ceiling, with Geoffrey Bennison’s monumental gilt-brass bookcases (Lots 573-576). The effect was supremely confident, richly evocative of continental Europe, and deliberately un-English. This was the collection of a man who, as he used to say, was at home with the English, but not of them. The collection witnessed its owner’s strongly Euro-centric interests and preoccupations. Indeed, almost the only major picture in the collection with even a remotely English connection is a portrait of a Frenchman: the engineer and savant, Bernard Forest de Bélidor, who became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1726 (Lot 541). Otherwise, works by English artists, or depicting English subjects, barely figure among Weidenfeld’s collection.One preoccupation predominates in the collection over all the rest. For though Weidenfeld’s professional career was devoted to the world of publishing, the abiding intellectual interest of life was the functioning of power, in all its protean forms. He was fascinated by the ideas and ideologies that animated it; by the courts and networks that mediated it; and, above all, by the friends and acquaintances in his circle who actually had it. His reputation for shrewdness and sagacity made him the intimate confidant of a series of statesmen – from Harold Wilson to Angela Merkel – and of a no less extensive following of tycoons. For his part, he was a natural consigliere, and he relished these relationships for the opportunities they afforded to observe the workings of power at first hand. This facet of Weidenfeld’s personality probably holds the key to resolving the collection’s central paradox – and to enjoying its mischievous tease. Why was it that George Weidenfeld – wholly secular in outlook, deeply proud of his Jewish heritage, a life-long Zionist who had taken a sabbatical from his publishing career in 1949 to serve as political advisor to Israel’s founding President, Chaim Weizmann – should choose to live his life surrounded by portraits of Roman Catholic cardinals and popes? There was no monastery or nunnery in the country where the Successors of Peter figured so prominently on the walls as they did at 9 Chelsea Embankment.Guests arriving at the apartment were first greeted in the library by a portrait of Pius V (r. 1566-72, the pope who had excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I), with his hand raised in benediction – as a Wodehousian butler shimmered among them with glasses of pre-dinner champagne rosé (Lot 565). Opposite, Pius’s immediate successor, Pope Gregory XIII (r. 1572-85), the promulgator of the Gregorian calendar still in use today, presided benignly above the fireplace (Lot 563). In the large combined drawing-dining room, the invisible line between the two spaces was demarcated by one of Weidenfeld’s prize possessions: a repoussé copper bust of the great Barberini pope, Urban VIII (r. 1623-44): the pontiff who condemned the theories of Galileo, but who was one of the greatest papal patrons of the arts. It was Urban who commissioned Bernini – by whose workshop this bust was produced – to create the towering bronze baldacchino over the high altar of St Peter’s, its columns abuzz with heraldic Barberini bees (Lot 560). Papal portraiture confronted Weidenfeld’s visitors at almost every turn. In one particularly fine example by Agostino Masucci, Pope Clement XII (r. 1730-1740), a connoisseur of Roman antiquities and builder of the Trevi Fountain, looks up from reading a letter to answer the viewer’s gaze (Lot 564). Marble relief portraits of assorted popes (Lots 567-568) hung immediately beside Weidenfeld’s favourite armchair. The papal theme even extended to Weidenfeld’s fine collection of twentieth-century works on paper. In one, a drawing by Feliks Topolski, what seems to be the portly figure of Pope John XIII (r. 1958-63), the convenor of the Second Vatican Council, is carried aloft on the sedia gestatoria, attended by an entourage of Swiss Guards (Lot 554).This fascination with Rome and the papacy was, of course, entirely untheological. Weidenfeld had no interest whatever in Roman Catholic practice or belief. What intrigued him, instead, was the papacy as an institution – with all its worldliness, saintliness, and factional intrigues – and how it had functioned, with astonishing durability, as an agency for the transmission of Western culture, a connecting bridge between modernity and the culture of ancient Rome: hence the collection’s concentration of pontiffs dating from the great classicizing periods in the papacy’s history, the Renaissance and the Baroque. The papal administration, the Curia, intrigued him no less. How was it, he would ask, that this tiny, Italian-dominated clerical élite, ruled by an elderly elective monarch, had come to be the custodian of the belief-systems of one quarter of the world’s population? Weidenfeld had encountered the papal court at first hand during his sabbatical year of 1949-50 when, as part of a delegation from President Weizmann, he was entrusted with persuading the Vatican’s Secretariat of State to grant diplomatic recognition to the newly proclaimed State of Israel. During the discussions, he encountered one of the Secretariat’s rising stars, Giovanni Montini – the future Pope Paul VI (r. 1963-1978) – and was greatly impressed by both his intelligence and his Sphynx-like inscrutability; Montini responded to one lengthy presentation by the young Weidenfeld with a single Latin word: ‘Videbo [I will see]’. In subsequent years, and in less taciturn company, Weidenfeld maintained and extended these links with the papal court. During the pontificate of John Paul II (r. 1978-2005), he became a regular guest at the pope’s annual symposium at the papal summer palace, Castel Gandolfo: a wholly private occasion at which the Polish pontiff brought together academics, clerics and figures in public life – of various faiths and none – to debate questions of common concern. Unable to resist the opportunity this afforded for a publishing coup, Weidenfeld embarked on a decade-long campaign to persuade John Paul II to write his memoirs and to have them published, of course, by his own firm of Weidenfeld and Nicolson – as ultimately happened in 2005. Thus, in a démarche that appealed greatly to Weidenfeld’s delight in irony, the bold entrepreneur, who in 1959 had risked prosecution for obscenity as the publisher of Nabokov’s Lolita, became, nearly five decades later, the publisher of a soon-to-be-canonized pope. Weidenfeld took mischievous pleasure in such unlikely pairings. Of none of his dinner-table placements was he prouder than one that brought together the Grand Mufti of Egypt, the British Chief Rabbi, and a former Mrs Jagger. These unexpected juxtapositions also extended to the display of his collection. In the dining room, the major picture over the fireplace was the 4th-century virgin-martyr, St Dorothy of Caesarea, by the Neapolitan Baroque painter Bernardo Cavallino (Lot 509) – the saint holding the apples and roses that were presented to her by a passing angel moments before her execution. Flanking St Dorothy on either side, however, were half a dozen closely-hung works on paper depicting femmes fatales of much less pious intent. These voluptuous female nudes – in drawings by Schiele (Lot 512), Klimt (Lots 513 & 515), and, less voluptuously, by Giacometti (Lot 510) – were a recurrent theme in the apartment: a monochrome, feminine, and slightly wicked counterpoint to all those masculine prelates in pontifical red.If there was a quality of playfulness in the display of Weidenfeld’s collection, in other contexts he used the bringing together of opposites to far more serious effect. Weidenfeld’s world-view had been shaped against the background of the rise of Nazism and the Second World War, and much of his life thereafter was devoted to building bridges between the former adversaries in that apocalyptic contest. The motive for this was not some sentimental spirit of do-goodery, but the bleak, to him, galvanizing, realization of how close Europe had come, in the decade before 1945, to destroying everything that he valued most: Europe’s culture, learning and civilization – and its Jews, the people that had provided some of the greatest exemplars of all three. Work for reconciliation between Germany and the State of Israel was one of the dominant preoccupations of his life, and, to him, the juxtaposition of opposites was an essential part of that task. Hence it was Weidenfeld who was the behind-the-scenes broker in the process that brought the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to stand before the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, in 1984, to speak of reconciliation. And work to effect further unexpected juxtapositions – to make it possible for an Uzbek shepherd’s son to study in Oxford as part of his Weidenfeld Scholarships Programme, or to aid Syria’s persecuted Christian minority by bringing endangered families to the West – occupied him almost to his very last day. All Weidenfeld’s popes bore, as their principal title, the once pagan moniker of ‘Pontifex Maximus’: literally, ‘Bridge-builder-in-chief’. It is a title which, just as appropriately, might have been applied to Weidenfeld himself. Though short of stature, George Weidenfeld was towering of intellect and spirit. Few collections suggest more seamlessly or subtly their owner’s cast of mind. And what a brilliant mind it was – with a wisdom born of a deep immersion in history, high intelligence, and the perceptive observation of the powerful and their ways; but always tempered, as he sat among all those cardinals and popes and saints, by a genial readiness to chuckle at the world’s absurdities and the ironies of the comédie humaine.THE PERFECT BACKDROP AN INTERIOR FOR LORD WEIDENFELD BY GEOFFREY BENNISONThe 1970s decoration of this justly famous London apartment is the outward manifestation of the talents of two towering personalities. Bought and decorated at the time when both owner and decorator were just beginning to become extremely well known, each in his own field. Sir George, later Lord, Weidenfeld, lived in a handsome turn of the century apartment, on the piano noble of number 9 Chelsea Embankment, the former home Gladstone’s Viceroy of India, Lord Ripon. Five minutes’ walk away on the Pimlico Road, the antique dealer Geoffrey Bennison’s reputation was growing, both for his highly original antique shop and his rare talent as a decorator – a reputation reinforced through commissions from stellar clients such as Terence Stamp and later, members of the Rothschild family. Bennison only accepted 11 clients during his decorating years; Weidenfeld was one. You never knew what you might find in Bennison’s emporium beyond the huge window, which was always set like a stage. There could be a huge gilded birdcage belonging to a 19th Century German princeling or a 16th Century Flemish verdure tapestry, jostled by a very large piece of late 18th Century Irish furniture, and two huge blue and white Chinese garnitures stuffed with white ostrich feathers. Lord Weidenfeld would have regularly passed Bennison’s window and felt it familiar because in so many essentials it reflected the tenor of his mind. Raised in the heavy interiors of the pre-war world, Weidenfeld spent his early years in richly layered houses and comfortable ‘zimmers’ to which each generation had added their own imprint. Bennison’s taste mirrored this perfectly. He skilfully divided the vast apartment into three distinct areas for entertaining, each with their own character and focal point; Weidenfeld’s stage was set. Rarely can client and decorator have been in such harmony with Lord Weidenfeld’s own multi-faceted collection harmoniously inhabiting Geoffrey Bennison’s rich interiors. To visit the apartment gave one the feeling that you were looking into Weidenfeld’s past whilst enjoying yourself in a very lively, lived-in and comfortable present.

A CHINESE BLUE AND WHITE PORCELAIN 'DOUBLE GOURD' VASE

JIAJING PERIOD (1522-1566)

Details

A CHINESE BLUE AND WHITE PORCELAIN 'DOUBLE GOURD' VASE
JIAJING PERIOD (1522-1566)
Decorated with wide bands of scrolling peonies
17 ½ in. (44.5 cm.) high

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Alexandra Cruden

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