Tra Primitivo e Primario. Dialoghi tra arte “primitiva” e arte contemporanea nella collezione Panza

The essay revolves around the interest that Giuseppe Panza di Biumo developed in collecting non-Western art and ethnographic objects from Africa and Oceania concurrently with his effort to gather an extensive collection of American art from the Abstract Expressionism to conceptual art. Through a thorough investigation of the photographs of the houses where Panza installed the works in Milan and the famous Villa in Varese, illustrated in major magazines between the 1960s and the 1970s, I argue that the collector showed a precocious interest in the mutual resonances as well as in establishing unexpected connections between the objects, by virtue of which the concern for subjects such as seriality, surface or color, as expressed by different American artists, resonates with and is emphasized by the juxtaposition with objects manufactured elsewhere. By doing so, I problematize Panza's attitude and reconstruct the system of the market of objects from Africa and Oceania in Italy and Europe since the postwar years.