The Scheringa Museum of Realist Art is up for sale, so it would seem. After about 21 days of trying to save the DSB Bank, the bank collapse together with its affiliates such as the football club AZ, a professional ice skating team and The Scheringa Museum of Realist Art.

The soccer club and ice skating team will not have so much trouble attracting new sponsors. The Scheringa Museum of Realist Art will however have problems surviving as a museum.

Dirk Scheringa and his wife Baukje started collecting some 20 year ago. Within a relatively short period of time the Scheringa Museum of Realist Art acquired an interesting collection with works of art by Carel Willink, Duane Hanson, Edgar Fernhout, Ernst Fritsch, Lucian Freud , Tamara de Lempicka and others. Tamara de Lempicka’s La Musicienne [1929] was one of the more important purchases they prided themselves to have made this year. According to Dirk Scheringa they managed to purchase the painting out-bidding the pop diva Madonna, who had set her mind on it.

Not long after, armed robbers raided the museum and stole La Musicienne together with Adolescence, a 1941 gouache by Salvado Dali. The case is still to be resolved and rumoures have it that the robbers were dissatisfied customers of the DSB Bank. For some time now the DSB Bank had been in trouble selling cut-throat financial products.

Yesterday evening in Holland’s most popular talk-show Pauw en Witteman, Schieringa stated that he was on the lookout for a collector whom would be interested in a takeover . The collection, so he said, was estimated at € 40 million and the brand-new museum building, which is nearly finished, is priced at € 36 million.

If and when a takeover of The Scheringa Museum of Realist Art cannot be realised, the only option left over, which will satisfy the stakeholders of the DSB Bank, is an auction of the complete collection.