Died 1974, Paris, France | ||
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Árpád Plesch (1889-1974) was an international Jewish financier, Banker and Hungarian lawyer. He owned a celebrated collection of rare botanical books and esoteric pornography. His botanical collection has been included in Douglas Cooper's Great Private Collections.
Plesch was mentor to the owner of the largest fortune in Italy, Giovanni Agnelli (1866-1945), the president of Fiat.
He married three times, to :
- Léonie Caro Ulam
- Marysia Ulam Krauss Harcourt-Smith, daughter of the previous
- Contessa Maria von Wurmbrand-Stuppach, called Etti Plesch, his last wife and sole heir to his immense fortune.
Marysia Ulam was the aunt of the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam. In his memoire, Adventures of a mathematician, Ulam wrote:
The Plesches lived between their apartment on the Avenue Foch in Paris and their Villa Leonina at Beaulieu-sur-Mer, in the South of France (where they built the superb Leonina botanical garden).
Plesch died in 1974 in Paris.