The owner of the bankrupt DSB bank, Dirk Scheringa, told the Dutch press he wants his art collection to remain intact.

The collection, housed in the purpose-built Museum for Realism in Spanbroek, was impounded last week by ABN Amro Bank. The bank is one of Mr Scheringa's creditors. The 1300 art works are collateral for DSB's 32 million euro mortgage debt. They include works by Dutch realists Carel Willink and Jan Mankes, as well as paintings by René Magritte and Lucian Freud.

Dutch Culture Minister Ronald Plasterk last week called on the art sector to make every effort to preserve the collection in one piece. Art critic Reinjan Mulder, however, wrote in NRC Handelsblad that the paintings and sculptures do not constitute a collection in the usual sense. He refers to a lack of coherence, to the uninspiring history of the collection, and to the absence of an underlying perception on the part of the collector.