Carmen Cervera, the Dowager Baroness Thyssen-Bornemisza and a former Miss Spain, is famed for getting her own way.
Tita, as she is known, won popularity in Spain for persuading her late husband, Baron Hans Heinrich von Thyssen-Bornemisza, to sell his private collection, then Europe’s largest, to the Spanish state in 1992.
The Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid, which houses the collection of the baron, who died in 2002, also exhibits works owned by Cervera, who struck a controversial deal with the government in 2021 to pay her nearly €100 million to keep them on public display.
Now Cervera, 81, is aiming to fulfil her cherished ambition to establish a museum in her birthplace of Barcelona more than a decade after a first attempt was thwarted.
