Art History/Biogr aphy Photo: Giorgio Colombo, Milan, 1989
Giuseppe Pa n z a Memories of a Collector Text by Giuseppe Panza
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About the Autho r Giuseppe Panza was born in Milan in 1923 to a prominent family of Italian wine merchants. He studied law and entered the real estate business, but soon became devoted to his true love: acquiring contemporary art for himself and for the leading museums of the world. He credited an interior “thermometer” that enabled him to spot up-and-coming movements, artists, and works of art, and over the course of fifty years and hundreds of purchases he was rarely wrong.
G IUSEPPE PANZA
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GIUSEPPE PANZA Memories of a Collector
Memories of a Collector
collector of contemporary art since the 1950s, Giuseppe Panza has been an influential force in the art world for more than sixty years, introducing American phenomena such as Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Pop Art, and Conceptualism to the museums of Europe. In a brilliant response to everyone’s primary question about modern art—“What does it mean?”—Panza shares philosophical insights and personal reflections that bridge a half-century of discovering new artists and movements. Panza was among the first to buy the works of Rothko, Kline, Lichtenstein, and many of the other major figures of post-World War II art, watching as their works skyrocketed in historic importance as well as monetary value. He pursued collecting enthusiastically throughout the 1980s and 1990s, while constantly searching for the best venues in which to display his latest acquisitions. Sections of his private collection have been exhibited and acquired into major collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Guggenheim in New York. Among his signature innovations was the juxtaposition of contemporary art with historic settings—Baroque palaces, ancient European public buildings, his own eighteenth-century villa—in order to create unexpected and stimulating dialogues between the architectural context and the works of art. Spanning decades of historical events and profound transformations in the artistic culture on both sides of the Atlantic—from his formative years during the Second World War to his first encounters with American culture, from his involvement in the avant-garde movements of the 1960s and 1970s to his more recent dealings with new protagonists on the contemporary stage—Giuseppe Panza’s story reveals a journey of impassioned research, artistic insight, and prophetic taste. This remarkable autobiography, illustrated with 110 full-color pictures, is a virtual tour of his collection and of his life, revealing for the first time the art that defined a century through the eyes of its foremost collector.
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