Who was Giuseppe Panza di Biumo?
Giuseppe Panza di Biumo was a prominent modern art collector in Italy during the second half of the 20th century. He was born in Milan on March 23, 1923, and passed away in Milan on April 24, 2010. He collected more than 2,550 pieces of informal art, abstract expressionism, pop art, minimalism, conceptual art, environmental art, organic art, and monochrome art between 1955 and 2010, which were displayed in some of the top contemporary art museums in the world. One of the best instances of his aesthetic and museographic vision as a balance between architecture, antique furnishings, and contemporary artworks is the Villa Menafoglio Litta Panza in Varese, where he spent the most of his life and built the collection.
Giuseppe Panza was born in Milan to rich wine merchant Ernesto Panza and Maria Mantegazza (his grandfather Alessandro had established the family business in Monferrato). Giuseppe picked Villa Menafoglio Litta in Varese, which Ernesto Panza bought in 1935, as the best location to display his collection of modern art. The family was given the title of Counts of Biumo, named after the Varese neighborhood where the aforementioned villa is located, five years later, in 1940, by King Victor Emmanuel III.
Ernesto Panza passed away in 1948, leaving his sons the business, the real estate, and the building regions. After graduating from law school with a thesis on the philosophy of law, Giuseppe dedicated himself to exploring the prospect of new investments to build on his father's real estate heritage after the paternal firm was forced to close owing to a crisis in commerce. His trip through North America to Los Angeles in 1954, which began in New York, had a significant impact on the development of his artistic sensibility.
He married Rosa Giovanna Magnifico and moved in with her at the home on Corso di Porta Romana after returning to Milan in 1955. Giuseppe Panza and his wife started their art collection for their Milan house with little money. Giuseppe Panza's approach of collecting is unique in that it allows for the identification of a small group of artists and the broadest possible acquisition of their works, enabling in-depth research as opposed to a broad perspective and actively assisting the artists in the creation of works.
The collection of Giuseppe Panza was formed in accordance with an idealist and Hegelian aesthetic vision of art, leading to the selection of mainly abstract and minimalist works capable of enabling the viewer to access the dimension of the infinite and the absolute through the finite structure of the work. The value conveyed in the work of art as an environment, a harmonious architectural balance that permits the plunge inside oneself and activates the mechanism of perception, is where the aesthetic evolution of the collector begins.
Giuseppe Panza had a significant impact on developments in art history, collecting preferences, and museographic vision in Italy and around the world. He was a true patron for the artists he supported and encouraged according to a clear aesthetic vision and a pioneer in the selection of artistic movements at their inception, which only a few years later received consecration by critics and the public. Starting in the 1970s, he decided to sell or donate his collection in compact cores to some of the largest international museums for the public to enjoy. These museums included the Solomon Guggenheim in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
Collections
European Informal & Pop art
Giuseppe Panza visited galleries and leaned on the critics he believed were most sensitive to the developments of a new art in Milan in 1955 after returning from his trip to the United States in 1954. Through Guido Le Noci of the Apollinaire Gallery, from whom he purchased some pieces by Atanasio Soldati and Gino Meloni, the first to enter the collection, he met Pierre Restany, French art critic and founder of the Nouveau Réalis.
Giuseppe Panza finds works by Franz Kline and American Abstract Expressionism in the IRI magazine "The Civilization of Machines," which he purchases through gallery owner Sidney Janis of New York; at Peppino Palazzoli's Galleria Blu, he purchases a significant body of Mark Rothko's work. Through John Cage, he connected with gallery owners Leo Castelli, Ileana Sonnabend, and Richard Bellamy in 1958. Between 1958 and 1962, he bought pop artwork by James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg, and George Segal from their New York galleries, which he then displayed with museographic attention to the surroundings in his Milanese home and the Villa Menafoglio Litta Panza in Varese.
Minimal, conceptual & environmental art
Giuseppe Panza picked up collecting again in 1966, this time with a focus on minimal and light art. At Gian Enzo Sperone's Gallery, he became familiar with the work of Dan Flavin and eventually became one of the gallery's major collectors. With the addition of pieces by Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Bruce Nauman, Carl Andre, Richard Serra, and Jene Highstein, the collection's minimalist art core has been enriched. By 1968, a collection of conceptual art was being assembled at the same time that the movement was taking shape thanks to the purchases of pieces by Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, Sol LeWitt and On Kawara, Seth Siegelaub, Roman Opalka, Douglas Huebler, Cioni Carpi, and Vincenzo Agnetti.
Robert Ryman, Brice Marden, and Robert Mangold's American minimalist paintings were acquired by Panza beginning in the early 1970s. In these years, the Varese Villa acquires a "relative" relationship to the artworks as actual environmental art practices are investigated there. Giuseppe Panza departs for California and purchases the environmental art works by Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Maria Nordman, Eric Orr, Larry Bell, and Douglas Wheeler that were displayed in the Villa Panza's Rustici between 1973 and 1976. He also buys the first Robert Irwin "records" at the Sonnabend Gallery in Paris and the Pace Gallery in New York.
Organic art, small object art & monochrome art
After a very long break in acquisitions, the collection started up again in 1987, launching three new areas of inquiry: small object art by Stuart Arends and Barry X Ball, Jonathan Seliger, David Goerk, Robert Tiemann, Carole Seborovski, and Ron Griffin; organic art by Martin Puryear, Peter Shelton, Ross Rudel, Allan Graham, Meg Webster, Christiane Loehr, and Emil Lukas; and monochrome art by David Simpson, David Simpson, Anne Appleby, Winston Roeth, Phil Sims, Ruth Ann Fredenthal, John Mc Cracken, Ettore Spalletti, Alfonso Fratteggiani Bianchi, Michel Rouillard, Sonia Costantini, Timothy Litzman, Rudolph De Crignis, Roy Thurston and Lies Kraal.
Lawrence Carroll, Max Cole, Ford Beckman, Roni Horn, Franco Vimercati, Hanne Darboven, Hamish Fulton, Allan Graham, Gregory Mahoney, Julia Mangold, Maurizio Mochetti, Richard Nonas, Thomas Schutte, Peter Shelton, Jan Vercruysse, Ian Wilson, and Sean Shanahan were among the authors whose works he purchased during the same period. Giuseppe Panza brings to life a collection of Primary Art, sculptures from Africa and pre-Columbian Mexico, and a collection of 17th-century skulls in parallel to the art collections with the shared goal of providing new aesthetic models and enhancing the ability to comprehend the diverse.
Panza collection in museums
As the Panza collection began to grow in size in the early 1970s, it became clear that exhibition spaces were needed in order to split the collection into compact centers rather than disseminate it. In 1984, Giuseppe Panza sold eighty pieces from the first collection to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and in 1990, he donated seventy works by ten Los Angeles-based artists to the same museum. Attempts to permanently house the collection in the German museums of Münchengladbach and Düsseldorf as well as in some historical venues in Italy were unsuccessful.
Two years later, the Guggenheim Foundation received one hundred and fifty works as a donation and a loan for three hundred and thirty minimal, conceptual, and environmental works. In 1990, the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York purchased twenty-two minimal paintings and sculptures from the 1960s and 1970s. A number of site-specific works created especially for Villa Menafoglio Litta Panza in Varese are also included in the acquisition package; these works are still displayed in their original location. For these works, the Fondo per l'Ambiente Italiano devised the formula of permanent loan in 1994, allowing the works to remain in Varese, where their aesthetic and conceptual integrity can maintain close harmony with their surroundings. Giuseppe Panza donated 200 pieces of organic and monochromatic artwork to the Museo Cantonale d'Arte in Lugano in 1994. In 1996, Villa Panza in Biumo Superiore was donated to the Fondo Ambiente Italiano, along with its furnishings, collection of African art, architecture, and park.
Seventy-one works were purchased by the Albright-Knox Collection in Buffalo in 2007, while a core of thirty-nine conceptual, minimal, and environmental works were sold by Giuseppe Panza to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, in 2008. Twenty-five pieces of conceptual and minimal art were purchased by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2010. The Palazzo Ducale in Gubbio, the Palazzo della Gran Guardia in Verona, the Palazzo Ducale in Sassuolo, MART in Rovereto, and Bocconi University in Milan are just a few of the historic buildings in Italy that will host some of the Panza collection's temporary loaned nuclei, some of which are still in progress and others which have already been completed.
Villa Panza: the contemporary art collection
On the Biumo hill in Varese, Villa Panza is situated in a peaceful and affluent neighborhood that may be reached by ascending a steep alley bordered by grand houses. We'll reveal the tour route for this 18th-century villa, whose windows look out upon a lovely Italianate garden.
Meg Webster's "water cone"—a simple, geometric cone with a water flush that reflects the sky, the building's walls, and the faces of onlookers—stands in the middle of the courtyard. The ground-floor living area then has red velvet sofas, 18th-century stucco, and modern furnishings, including lovely vases that interact with the David Simpson and Max Cole wall art. The collection at Villa Panza is united by this unique mix of the past and present.
The Californian painter and maestro of color Phil Sims has monochrome paintings in the adjacent area where you can play pool. The artwork appears to be one color, but closer inspection reveals layers of various hues, several brushstrokes, and an equal number of pigments that enable complex color interactions. The Salone Impero, the large social space created by Napoleon's architect Luigi Canonica, is reached after meandering through the various rooms on the ground floor, including the dining room with Max Cole's hypnotic black canvases on the walls and the hall with the 19th-century piano and works by Ford Beckman.
With the light coming in through the French doors, the enormous, sparkling chandelier in the middle of the room casts light patterns on the floor. Four enormous monochrome panels by David Simpson are hung on the walls. Because of the embedded micro metal particles, their color changes depending on the light and the angle from which you view them. Each piece was specifically created for each space and each wall; Giuseppe Panza di Biumo reconfigured every piece to find the ideal location.
On the second level, we get a view of the old chapel from the 18th century, which Piero Portaluppi, a Lombard architect, renovated into a bathroom in 1930. The murals on the ceiling bounce off the green and white marble nicely. Ettore Spalletti's pastel-colored pieces, which are displayed in the Panzas' two bedrooms, are inspired by the Abruzzo region's sea and sky. Baroque benches, a 1400s chest inlaid with designs by Masaccio's brother, and other David Simpson pieces may be found in the galleries.
From domestic settings to rustic ones, we move on: these rooms are devoted to settings made by Dan Flavin, who rethinks settings and changes them with his vibrant neon. There are 207 pink, green, and yellow fluorescent tubes lighting the hallway. Each room is an immersion in light that delivers a different sensation; the light can either be upsetting or calming. The view is calmed by savoring the piece of the sky visible from the sunset-oriented lunette designed by James Turrell at the end of the corridor, which has the strength of Flavin's light behind it.
The works of Robert Irwin are also present in the other white rooms, including a wall that frames a window that overlooks the garden without shutters or glass, creating the impression that part of the scene is a painting. Then a confusing corridor that had been transformed by a thin mist appeared. Extending the visit is the temporary exhibition project "Ex natura. New Works from the Collection of Giuseppe Panza di Biumo" and a stroll in the park to see the artwork.
Selena Mattei
| ArtMajeur Magazine