IT IS October 11 and the doors of the spectacular new Shanghai Museum are firmly closed to the masses so that the wealthy patrons who have made all this beauty available to the public can browse around undisturbed. There goes Sir Joseph Hotung ambling towards the Watt Kwai Lau Sculpture Gallery. Up on the second floor, T. T. Tsui seems to be heading for the Sir R. R. Shaw Chinese Paintings Gallery. Alice Lam, co-chairman of Sotheby's Asia, and her daughter Patti are practically galloping up the escalators to get a good look at the Calligraphy Gallery. Local furniture dealer Grace Wu Bruce can hardly drag herself away from, of course, the Chuang Gallery of Chinese Furniture. This place is a society magazine editor's delight.
The puzzle during this official preview is the extremely glamorous gweilo - Armani suit, honey-brown hair, large dark eyes, seductive smile and unmistakable southern European accent. She just doesn't quite seem to fit in, striding past this Hong Kong elite without a backward glance. Sometimes she is pursued by an elderly but clearly forceful gentleman in a wheelchair and by two young men in sports jackets. It seems unlikely the Hong Kong collectors realise that this is Baroness Thyssen-Bornemisza - that hyphen reflects years of European history - once not-so-plain Carmen Cervera, Miss Spain 1961, known to her close friends as Tita. With her is her elderly and incredibly wealthy husband, Heinrich.
Tita is in Shanghai with a sizeable entourage because she has lent the new museum 60 paintings from her private collection for three months. The K. K. Leung Exhibition Gallery on the first floor now contains paintings by names like Gauguin, Pissaro, Toulouse-Lautrec, Matisse and even a Picasso, along with examples of Tita's passion, the little known 19th-century Spanish genre paintings: bright - some would say lurid - canvases depicting Madrid street scenes and society women wearing bustles.
The gallery is beautifully decorated, well lit and houses her well-organised exhibition that scans the last three hundred years of Western art, from a few Old Masters through the landscapes and the Impressionists of the 19th century to the German Expressionists. If there is nothing spectacular or well-known here, at least there is a wide range. But still Tita's offering does not seem to be pulling the crowds and she soon tires of racing around. She ends up having an impromptu chat in the tea rooms with the only people who really know who she is, the four tabloid photographers and one hack she has bought with her from Spain.
She and her paintings are undeniably an oddity in this shrine to the longevity of Oriental art and today's Oriental wealth. Five years ago, any kind of Western art would have held its own in a Chinese museum. Today, Tita's lesser known pieces are dwarfed by comparison with the quality in the rest of the museum, those stunning 11th-century BC bronzes and superb Tang dynasty Buddhist sculptures. Tita's performance as a Major Celebrity, ignored by most of the attending Asian VIPs, is just as incongruous, especially, as one indignant member of the Hong Kong art world puts it, 'she only lent a few paintings. Some of those people paid for entire galleries'.
TWO years ago, when the loan was first mooted, having a selection from the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection to represent the wonders of Western art at the opening of the world's most prestigious showcase of Chinese art must have seemed entirely appropriate. If the Shanghai Museum authorities had to have Western art, this was likely to be as good as anything they could ever borrow. 'My jaw dropped when I first heard they had pieces from the Thyssen collection,' says one prominent Hong Kong visitor who attended the private viewing, 'but I was a bit disappointed with what I saw.' The great expectations are hardly surprising. Tita's husband, Baron Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, 75, is universally acknowledged as one of the most important private collectors in the world. Second only, in fact, to the Queen. The Thyssen money comes from steel, the title and the Bornemisza name comes from the current Baron's mother, a Hungarian aristocrat. Heini built up the steel business, built up the art collection and, in his spare time, married five times. By 1987, the 1,500 works that made up the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection was valued at around ?1.85 billion (HK$22.55 billion). The Baron showed less financial acumen in his marital life: the fourth Baroness, Denise Shorto, who divorced him on the grounds of his adultery with Tita, was rumoured to have cost him ?77 million in jewellery alone.