Mr. and Ms.Panza

Most people who have any interest in Post-War American art, whether Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism,  Environmental Art, Conceptualism or Monochromism have heard of the great Italian art collector, Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo who passed away at age 87 in Milan on April 24, 2010.  In many ways a modern day Medici, Count Panza together with his wife, Giovanna, and with enormous love, courage, foresight and brilliance, amassed three distinct collections featuring more than 2500 works from the mid -1950′s to the present, mostly of American art.  They mostly liked to acquire in depth from mature artists who were as yet not well known but would later be recognized as the major artists of their era.  These included such artists as Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Robert Irwin, Brice Marden, Richard Serra, Dan Flavin, Robert Ryman, Joseph Kosuth, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Cy Twombly, Richard Long, Lawrence Weiner, James Turrell, Roni Horn, Martin Puryear, Lawrence Carroll and many others. The Panzas were, in fact, the first major collectors of these artists and by making a strong statement through their collection as well as their aesthetic inclination, they signaled to others that these artists were significant and should be taken into consideration.  Their massive acquisitions influenced American and world art history and art markets profoundly, as well as enhanced the collections of several American museums such as the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Hirshorn.

In 1996, Villa Menafoglio Litta Panza, the home of Count Panza and his wife, was donated to the FAI (Italian Environment trust, a not-for-profit organization founded more than 30 years ago), and it was subsequently opened to the public. Nowadays it is a Museum opened to any sort of public, from students to art lovers, from scholars to artists that can stroll in the Villa’s park and visit the rooms devoted to those artists part of the collection. The huge Villa hosts only 10 per cent of the entire collection that Count Panza amassed over half a century: an impressive 2,500 works, ranging from Jean Fautrier and Franz Kline to James Rosenquist, James Turrell, Bruce Nauman and John McCracken. These pieces were bought when nobody knew who these artists were, for little money and in large numbers. To see the latest evolutions of the collection, the purchases dating back to the 1980s and 90s, you would have to embark on an “Italian Grand Tour”, covering the Museum of Modern Art in Rovereto, the Palazzo della Gran Guardia in Verona and the Palazzo Ducale of Sassuolo and Gubbio, with a detour to the Swiss Museo Cantonale in Lugano. But the vast majority of the Count’s artworks are to be found at the MOCA in Los Angeles (Kline, Rothko, Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, Lichtenstein) and the Guggenheim in New York (Flavin, Judd, Serra, Andre, Marden, Ryman, Nonas, Kosuth, Weiner) because, as Turrell once said, America had to buy its art back from him.

Count Panza started collecting in 1956, after his mother – who had studied painting in her youth – died, leaving him a considerable fortune. His first painting was by Tàpies, whom he had met in Paris. ‘The year after, I started buying Franz Kline; then, in 1958, Rothko, in 59 Rauschenberg, in 62 Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, Segal…’ In 1966, a set of fluorescent lights arrived at the gates of Biumo. ‘I met Dan Flavin not in New York, but in Milan,’ the Count recalled in an interview. ‘The Galleria Sperone opened its Milan branch with him. A few days before, he had been invited to Cologne for his first European solo show. I was immediately moved by his works, and bought them all, causing quite a scandal amongst the right-thinking, who deemed it inconceivable that someone would collect stuff easily found at an electrical outfitter.’ The 11 Flavin rooms in the Rustici wing of the Villa are the world’s largest collection of permanent installations by the Minimalist master, completed mostly during sojourns at the Villa in the mid-1970s. Particularly outstanding is the long ‘Varese Corridor’ (1976), in which fresh pink, light green and yellow colors echo the Rococo décor of the interior. Here, Panza’s interest in the interaction of color and light has its strongest manifestation. ‘Light is the least natural of natural things, a wave that is propagated through the universe and only becomes matter when it reaches our skin and optical nerve, otherwise it is invisible. Flavin’s lamps are an industrial product, and a banal one too. But when exhibited in the proper way, so that the light fills the whole space, then you understand why he made this gesture, and his vision of something unreachable and absolute.’

Villa Litta  Shot by Ferdinando Scianna  © Ferdinando Scianna/Magnum Photos

By the time, the seminal exhibition of Minimalist sculpture “Primary Structures” opened at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1966, Panza had also bought several pieces by Robert Morris. In 1970, when several rooms above the stables became available, he took the decision to use a wing of the house as a laboratory for environmental art. ‘When I went to Los Angeles in 1973, I met artists like Jim Turrell and Robert Irwin, creating artworks with light and space. I found their sensibility extremely close to mine, so I asked them to think of new installations for this specific site.’ Among the best results at Villa Panza, were Irwin’s ‘Varese Scrim’ (1973), which bisects one room with a white fabric screen that looks like a wall, and Turrell’s ‘Sky Space I, Varese’, 1976 (1976), a blindingly white cube open to the sky.

It’s a feast for the eyes to see how successfully past and present intermingle in the Villa. The minimalistic, monochrome paintings and sculptures that Panza started collecting in the 1980s (David Simpson, Phil Sims, Ruth Ann Fredenthal, Winston Roeth, Stuart Arends, Ettore Spalletti) fit with the lightness of the architecture, but also with the Tuscan Renaissance walnut furniture, the Louis XV gilded consoles and mirrors and the crystal chandeliers, as in the splendid Empire Room. ‘To me, the relationship with architecture is fundamental, because the works do not exist on their own. They always have a context, a space surrounding them that deeply affects our perception and comprehension. I had the fortune to use this house, which has harmonious proportions and a special genius loci. To me, it was essential to understand how to exhibit art in different buildings, both ancient and modern, like the museums by Isozaki, Gehry, Botta.’ Count Panza personally supervised the installation of all his works, studying each space beforehand and drawing up extremely detailed plans in ink.

The growing size of the collection and the need to exhibit it properly were the reasons why Panza’s holdings became a public affair in the 1980s. ‘There was a considerable interest from several museums. My first desire was to find one in Italy. I was contacted by the Piemonte Region to try and bring the collection to the Castello di Rivoli, just outside Turin – a city that was already the stronghold of Arte Povera. As I have always collected international artists, mainly American, and very few Italian, there was intense opposition there. Then came vague proposals from Poggio al Caiano near Florence, Venice, Parma, Rome, Milan… Nothing concrete, though. So I looked elsewhere.’ In 1984, 150 works (80 acquired, 70 donated) covering the first phase of the Panza collection went to LA MOCA. In 1990, it was the Guggenheim’s turn; they received 300 pieces (200 acquired, 100 donated) from the 1960s and 70s.

A few comments about art collecting by a pioneer:

"When I become interested in an artist," Count Panza explained, "I like to have many of his works. On the other hand, I don't like to have works by too many artists but many works by a few."

"I collect the artists with whom I feel a common ideal. They may be very different in the way they express themselves, but perhaps not so different in their basic ideas about life. Art is a mirror of life - it is not something separate."

"I met Dan Flavin when I saw the first show he had in Europe in Milan, in 1966. I was immediately impressed because there was a profound meaning within his art which was very distant from the industrial medium that he was using. Everybody laughed at me because I was buying expensive works of art which were made from objects it was possible to buy from the electrical shop on the corner." (In the early days, a Flavin installation was $300, now many years after the artist's death - the tag is more than $300,000.)

"I was buying what I liked, I wasn't thinking about afterwards. When I bought something it was because it reflected my way of thinking. For example, Flavin was not using neon tubes so much as light, and that is something metaphysical. So I was happy to own this art because in it I found myself."