Timeo Danaos

My hotel in Zagreb last week was next to a grand edifice, the Mimara art museum. I was one of the few visitors and wandered round the antiquities, medieval polychrome wood carvings and old masters alone. The museum was opened in 1987 to house the collection given to the nation by Ante Topic Mimara. The leaflet given out to visitors is gushing:

"This publication provides us with a further opportunity to express publicly our gratitude and our appreciation of our late donor, Ante Topic Mimara, who has placed his nation and the city of Zagreb in his debt by a noble gesture - the gift of his magnificent art collection ..... He was a man of subtle taste with an innate sense of true beauty and the harmony of aesthetic experience, a cosmopolitan spirit, to whom no expression of true artistic worth was alien .... It is certain that his personality, his intelligence and the nobility of his purpose will remain for ever present in the display, the richness and the beauty of these works of art."

No information, though, about who he was or how he acquired the means to build this collection of over 3,750 works, or where it came from. Curious, I googled him and came up with an article by Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which describes him as

"a scam artist, art thief, art forger, a master spy for Tito, a KGB agent and perhaps a killer"

Which is a rather different assessment. Hoving's article alleges, in some detail, that Mimara stole hundreds of works of art from the Collecting Point, the Nazis' central repository in Munich for works of art seized during the war. There's another long article entitled The Master Swindler of Yugoslavia on lootedart.com which sets out Mimara's villainy and dismisses many of the works as fakes. Intriguingly, the collection includes paintings which used to belong to Martin Boorman and Hermann Goering.

So maybe this is why no-one visits the museum: it's a highly visible embarrassment for the city.