Italian industrialist and real-estate investor Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo (b. 1923; d. 2010) and his wife, Giovanna, are widely recognized to be among the most important art collectors of the second half of the 20th century. Their collecting has been characterized by a dedication to representing the work of certain living artists in depth, guided by a spirit of rigorous intellectual engagement and probing. A former student of philosophy, Dr. Panza considered the work he collected to be part of a larger theoretical and spiritual inquiry, an integral aspect of a personal search for meaning. Since the mid-1950s, he and Giovanna often proved themselves to be ahead of others in recognizing the significance of many of the most important artists and currents of the past half century.

The Panzas began building their collection in 1956. Initially, they focused on European and American painting and sculpture of the mid-1940s through early 1960s, purchasing works by European postwar artists such as Jean Fautrier and Antoni Tàpies, and American Abstract Expressionists such as Franz Kline and Mark Rothko. They were also among the first patrons of Pop art, purchasing eleven of Robert Rauschenberg’s “combines” of the mid-1950s, as well as works by Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and James Rosenquist. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, purchased the major part of this early chapter of the Panzas’ collection in 1984.

In 1966 the Panzas turned their attention to Minimalism after Dr. Panza saw a reproduction of a piece by Robert Morris. Drawn to Minimalism’s emphasis on simple, reduced, geometric forms—which, to Dr. Panza, represented a search for the essential—the Panzas began acquiring sculptures by Morris, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, and Carl Andre; Minimalist paintings by Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, and Robert Ryman; and Post-Minimalist works by Richard Serra. In the late 1960s they also became interested in artists working in Southern California who produced perceptual environments, such as Robert Irwin, James Turrell, and Doug Wheeler, and in Conceptual artists working on both coasts and in Europe, such as Hanne Darboven, Douglas Huebler, Sol LeWitt, and Lawrence Weiner. The collection they formed soon became internationally recognized as the most important single concentration of works of the 1960s and 1970s, forming an unrivaled historical document of the art of this period.

In 1991 and 1992, wishing to keep this part of his collection largely intact, and attracted by the Guggenheim’s history as a collection with a specialized focus—one which Dr. Panza cited as model for his own collecting—the Panzas sold and gifted over 350 Minimalist, Post-Minimalist, and Conceptual artworks to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Spearheaded by Guggenheim Director Thomas Krens,who had been in discussion with Panza even before coming to the museum in 1988, this major acquisition transformed the Guggenheim into one of the world’s leading centers for the exhibition, preservation, and study of the art of the 1960s and 1970s and gave the Guggenheim depth and quality in its postwar holdings to match the strength of its prewar collection.

The acquisition of the Panza Collection may be seen as an outgrowth of the Guggenheim’s founding mission to collect and promote abstract art—albeit a very different type of abstraction than the type of spiritually inflected nonobjective painting prized by Solomon R. Guggenheim and Hilla Rebay. At the same time, the acquisition looked forward to, and laid the conceptual groundwork for, the Guggenheim’s contemporary collection. Minimalism has been interpreted as a pivotal bridge in the history of 20th century art, representing both the culmination of the modern movement that began in the 19th century and, simultaneously, a departure that paved the way for what was to follow. With its stellar representation of seminal Minimalist artworks, as well as Post-Minimalist and Conceptual artworks of the later 1960s and 1970s, the Panza Collection has enabled the Guggenheim to represent the most immediate historical roots of today’s expanded and richly pluralistic art field.