Giuseppe Panza

Giuseppe Panza di Biumo (23 March 1923 – 24 April 2010) was a collector of modern art. He lived in Milan and Varese, Italy.

Life and work Giuseppe Panza was born on March 23, 1923, in Milan. His father, Ernesto, was a wine distributor who invested in real estate and in 1940 was given the title of count by King Vittorio Emanuele III. He earned a law degree at the University of Milan in 1948 but never practiced. By 1999, the collection had 2,500 works. The collection was described by Panza as having three parts: 1) 80 works acquired between 1956 and 1962, all sold to MOCA, LA 2) works of Minimal, Conceptual and Environmental art, most of which went to the Guggenheim 3) art purchased between 1987 and 1999, described as, "the largest part of the collection, built up during a particularly favorable period." In 1982, plans with Werner Schmalenbach of selling his collection to the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen failed due to cuts in the museum's budget.

Panza then arranged important gift and loan deals that greatly enhanced the collections of several American museums. In 1984, Panza sold 80 abstract Expressionist and pop works to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, whose founding director Pontus Hultén he had known since 1963 and formed the core of the museum's permanent collection soon after it opened in 1983. In 1994, Panza donated 70 items to MOCA by 10 young, local artists, including major sculptures by internationally known artist Robert Therrien. The MOCA LA donation was, according to Panza, seven works by each of ten artists: Lawrence Carroll, Greg Colson, Jeff Colson, Ron Griffin. Roy Thurston, Mark Lere, Gregory Mahoney. Ross Rudel, Peter Shelton, and Robert Therrien. . the Guggenheim, acquired, in a combined gift and purchase arrangement, more than 300 Minimalist sculptures and paintings in 1991 and 1992. Some of them were not purchased as physical objects but as Conceptual sculptures to be constructed from site to site. In order to pay for the $30 million package, Krens initiated a controversial deaccession plan, selling works by the likes of Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, and Amedeo Modigliani at Sotheby's in May 1990 for $47 million at the height of that art boom.

In 2008, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden made an acquisition of thirty-nine works from the Panza collection including multiple pieces by Joseph Kosuth, Robert Irwin, Robert Barry, Hamish Fulton, and On Kawara, among others. That same year, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery acquired 71 artworks by 15 artists, partly as a gift from the Panza family and through funds from the museum's special endowment for art acquisitions.

In 2010, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art acquired 25 of the remaining major works of Conceptual and Minimalist art from Panza's collection for an undisclosed price.

About 10 per cent of his 2,500-piece collection remains in the 18th-century Villa Menafoglio Litta Panza at Varese outside Milan, where the Panzas installed an ever-changing show. The building has of exhibition space and site-specific works by artists including James Turrell, Robert Irwin and Dan Flavin. Other artists shown in Varese include Ruth Ann Fredenthal, Allan Graham, Ford Beckman, and David Simpson. Panza's archive is divided between Lugano, Switzerland, and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. At the Venice Biennale in 2011, artist Barry X Ball installed nine marble sculptures depicting Panza's head in different scales and surfaces at Ca' Rezzonico.