Villa Panza

Callen is writing about the Grand Tour; I'm in the enviable position of actually doing it – or some version of it, at any rate. I'm not going to be able to make it to Sculpture Projects Münster, but I will be in Kassel at the beginning of next week, and I arrive in Venice for the Biennale on Friday. Thursday night will be spent at a grand nexus of art and money – of which more soon – while today, Wednesday, was devoted to probably the greatest art experience I'll have on the entire tour: a visit to the Villa Panza, in Varese.

Now this is an art market blog, as opposed to an art blog, so I'll try to keep the gushing over artworks to a minimum. But the minimum is a lot less than zero, for the Villa Panza is the single best place to view minimal art on planet earth. It's better than Dia:Beacon; it's better than Chinati. And the reason is that it's infused with the individual and infectious personality and vision of one of the greatest art collectors of all time, Giuseppe Panza di Biumo.

Now I should mention here that I'm not a believer in the concept of the Great Eye, and I vacillate dreadfully even when it comes to the concept of Great Art. My head tells me that the path to art-world success is paved with happenstance and fortuitousness, and that anybody who sees his choice in art ratified, over the years, by the art market is more lucky than smart. But then I go to the Villa Panza, and all of that theorizing goes straight out the Robert Irwin portal, for there is clearly something truly exceptional about Giuseppe Panza – he's a collector who not only was astonishingly and consistently prescient over a period of decades, but he also, in his enthusiasm, was enormously important for the development of some of the most beautiful, timeless, and groundbreaking art ever created.

Panza started collecting art in the 1950s, and most assuredly did not receive the social cachet that today's gazillionaires seek when dropping eight-figure sums on a Hirst or a Warhol. Panza explains, in the official villa guide (sponsored by Prada):

When people saw the Franz Klines that filled the first floor Dining Room, they would say that they looked like they had been done by a child spilling black paint on white canvas; the seven Rothkos that covered the wall of the Drawing Room and the Staircase were instead considered to be the work of a decorator who had been having fun with the canvases. When in 1959 the eleven Rauschenbergs arrived, they were greeted not with indignation for the humiliation to which culture had been subjected nor irony with regards to a poor creature who had lost his mind, but rather the most sincere hilarity: this was stuff dragged out of the rubbish bin.

I think that a lot of Panza is encapsulated in that one clause, "when in 1959 the eleven Rauschenbergs arrived". Just one would have been borderline unthinkable; eleven shows a level of commitment bordering on mania – a level of commitment which actually, in some cases, exceeded the artists' own. Here's James Turrell, in the same book:

I think that Panza just lets himself go completely... The real difference is finding and collecting every artist in depth. Panza had, I remember, 9 Mardens, 23 Naumans, and 17 of my works. The stuff needed large spaces. It was an obsession... In some ways, as an artist, you wonder if this person is more committed than you are, so you question your own commitment when you deal with people of this kind.

Seventeen Turrells. Including, it's important to note, the very first skyspace that Turrell ever built for any collector or museum – a skyspace, dating to 1976, which is as gorgeous today as it was 30 years ago. Panza was an essential source of funding for Turrell, and Flavin, and Irwin, and dozens of other artists who have long since become art-world megastars more than capable of selling out any show sight unseen, but who back then were far from saleable. Indeed, Panza was, I think, the first individual ever to actually commission the site-specific art which revolutionized the art world in the 1970s.

Panza's collection became so gigantic that even after donating a whopping great chunk of it to LACMA, and another huge chunk to the Guggenheim (about a third of the gift filled up the Guggenheim Bilbao), he still has a vast collection of his own – easily big enough to put on a first-rate temporary exhibition devoted to the works that Joseph Kosuth made between 1965 and 1974. (I'm a huge Kosuth fan, and it was this show which really drew me to the villa in the first place.)

Panza still maintains quarters at the villa, even after donating it to the Italian National Trust, and indeed he was there today, when I visited. The first two floors of the villa are now devoted to a permanent exhibition of Panza's choosing – and it was here, rather than with the Kosuths, that I was utterly blown away. Yes, the Turrell is impressive, and the Irwin scrim piece is gorgeous, and the Flavins – the largest collection outside the US – are installed to perfection. But those are site-specific, and therefore Panza more or less had to include them.

But, from his enormous collection, which artists did Panza choose to decorate his own villa with, when he opened it up to the public? This is where I get really impressed. Check out this list: Hubert Kiecol. Ruth Ann Friedenthal. Robert Therrien. Phil Sims. David Simpson. Max Cole. Ettore Spalletti. Stuart Arends. Winston Roeth. Ford Beckman. Julia Mangold. (Yes, Julia, not Robert.)

These are all first-rate artists. But none of them is close to being a household name, and I doubt that any Russian oligarchs or hedge-fund billionaires are throwing seven-figure sums at any of them. I'm sure that Max Cole, a woman, is heartily sick of the Agnes Martin comparisons by now, but they're more than warranted, and Ford Beckman, when exhibited in quantity, as he is here, proves himself to be a much greater artist than, say, the much more famous and superficially similar Sean Scully.

What Panza has done with his villa is not show off the artists who have already made it, in order to bask in their reflected glory; instead, he's infectiously enthusing over a set of austere yet stunningly beautiful works by artists whom he thinks very highly of but who have yet to achieve the highest level of art-world fame. And he's showing them in a setting which simply can't be improved on: David Simpson's paintings, especially, are exhibited in natural light in the baroque villa and just shine. What museum or gallery would even dare to hang them on a pale-blue wall, as they are here, in the Empire Dining Room? But they look all the more stunning for it, and for all the other decorative elements in the room.

The Villa Panza is the perfect size for an art museum: think the Frick Collection, in New York, or the Dulwich Picture Gallery, in London. It elevates without becoming overwhelming, and the visitor leaves feeling lighter, and much happier, than when he arrived. I can't say that I'm holding out any hope that the Bienalle or Documenta will have anything like the same effect.

In the chaos of a monster show, a great but lesser-known artist like those at Villa Panza can easily get lost – although the national pavilions in Venice do serve to offset that effect by concentrating on just one artist. Maybe I'll find something similarly inspiring there: I hope I do. But I suspect that the artistic high point of my Grand Tour is already behind me.

–Felix Salmon