Art Collector Panza Looking to Artists the Market Left Behind : Planning to Buy for First Time Since 1976, Count Would Concentrate on L. A. Works

Art collector Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo expects to begin buying art again within the next year and will concentrate on works by Los Angeles artists. Panza, whose Milan-based contemporary art collection was appraised in June at about $28 million, has not purchased any artworks since 1976.

Panza received $2 million from the Museum of Contemporary Art in June as this year’s scheduled payment toward his $11-million sale to MOCA of 80 Abstract Expressionist and Pop artworks. Panza and his wife Giovanna, interviewed Tuesday at MOCA offices, said they hoped to buy art by artists already in their collection and by lesser-known artists.

“We stopped buying for economic reasons,” said the 64-year-old businessman. “Now our economic situation is improving and we are able to start to buy again.”

But while other collectors push art prices to astronomical levels--culminating in the purchase this month of Van Gogh’s “Irises” for $53.9 million at auction--the Panzas are thinking small. He expects to pay about $10,000 an artwork--”some more or less”--and will concentrate on those artists the market has left behind or not yet ensnared.

For one thing, work by “very good young artists” is generally less expensive.

“It is interesting to see how the market for art is very high, but there are many artists we feel have been left out of the market,” said Panza. “Because the art market is crazy, it is possible to buy beautiful artworks that are reasonable in price.”

The Panzas are clearly after more than bargains, however. Panza told The Times a few years before the MOCA sale that while he sometimes traded artworks for other artworks, he never sold anything.

“The rationale for his collection,” artist Robert Irwin said at the time, “is the most old-fashioned, most traditional rationale of all-- la morte : You want to leave something after your death.”

Panza’s collecting is also spurred by passion, although the avant-garde art he buys reflects passions more of the mind than the heart.

“When we see new artists we believe very good, we have a strong wish to have their art,” Panza said. “To discover something new is one of the most beautiful things about being a collector of contemporary art.”

Another beautiful thing, of course, is that well-chosen new art can eventually become very, very valuable. Even after the Panzas’ $11-million sale to MOCA in 1984, enough remains in their collection for Sotheby’s this year to have appraised the more than 500 museum-quality contemporary artworks at just under $28 million.

New York dealer Leo Castelli, from whom Panza bought many artworks over the years, has said that Panza never paid more than $10,000 for an artwork, sometimes paying as little as $2,000 apiece for Rauschenbergs that today are worth $1 million or more.

It takes time for good art to appreciate, the Panzas say, both interrupting and repeating each other.

“The less-good art appreciates in five years,” Panza said, his wife nodding in agreement, “but then it goes down.”

Consider his experiences with works by Franz Kline. When he began buying Klines in 1956, says the soft-spoken, low-key Panza, “Kline was 10 times less expensive than Bernard Buffet. Now Buffet is 100 times less expensive than Kline.

“But when we started to collect, Bernard Buffet was judged a great master of the time. Nobody knew then about Kline.” MOCA purchased all 12 of Panza’s Klines in 1984.

So the Panzas spent part of the last two weeks here in search of the next Klines, visiting galleries and artists’ studios, meeting with artists they knew as well as “some new young artists.” They expect to also visit galleries and studios in New York during their stay there this week, but find that city’s younger artists “less interesting” than those in Los Angeles.

While Panza will talk without pause about his dreams, hopes and plans to house his existing collection, neither he nor his 55-year-old wife appears particularly eager to discuss their next round of collecting. They are “thinking about” buying, he said, not yet actually buying. But they expect to decide what to buy once they return to Milan next week, and they expect to be back in the market within a year.

They may have $2 million they received in June from MOCA, but Panza said, “We’ll see in the next six months how much money we have available to spend. . . . If I can sell off part of my business (real estate and industrial alcohol manufacturing), I will have money to spend. Otherwise, I will have to wait.”

What will they buy?

Beyond saying that some of the artists are working in such traditional forms as painting and sculpture, while others work in “light and space,” the Panzas declined to name artists or dealers. But the potential group includes “artists we know, in the interest of completing our collection, plus artists who are not yet famous but who we believe are good,” he said.

How much will they buy?

Another good question. Surrounded by Andy Warhol silk-screens of Chairman Mao, both Panzas simultaneously folded their arms across their chests. They clearly did not like all those questions and don’t even want to estimate how much they would spend. The most they would say is that they would expect to buy 20 to 40 works a year, depending on how much money they have available.

The Panzas preferred to talk about her work in Milan with homeless children or about his unending search for a permanent home for his many works by Donald Judd, Bruce Nauman, Dan Flavin and other mostly American pieces from the ‘60s and ‘70s. Aside from about 50 works either on exhibit or in storage in Basel, Switzerland, nearly everything else is in his 18th-Century villa and carriage houses in Varese, an hour out of Milan, or in storage there. U.S. newspapers have carried reports in recent years of plans to house the collection everywhere from castles outside Turin, Italy, to Los Angeles, and Panza came to Los Angeles this trip with innumerable exhibition plans.

Among his plans: About 80 minimalist works by Judd, Nauman and others travel to a new contemporary art museum in Madrid, where they will be exhibited from April to the end of October on one sprawling floor of a renovated hospital-turned-museum. From the end of June until mid-October, “light and space” installations, many created by Los Angeles-based artists, would be on loan for an exhibition at a former Fiat factory near Turin, he said.

That’s just the start. Should all go according to plan, Panza-owned works, probably by Dan Flavin and Richard Serra, would inaugurate a new exhibition space in downtown St. Paul, Minn., in 1989. And should the grandest plan of them all come to pass, anywhere from 100 to 200 of their artworks would be included in a huge, proposed contemporary art complex in rural Massachusetts set to open as early as 1990.

All of these exhibitions are relatively short-term. (Although the details of Panza’s long-term loan to the proposed Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art--MASS MoCA--are still in negotiation, Panza says he expects his artworks would probably not be there for longer than six years. Legislation to help fund renovation and other construction work on the museum, which would be operated by the Williams College Museum of Art, is before that state’s legislature.)

But the Panzas are clearly thinking long-term. And although assorted plans to house the collection in or among such Southern California institutions as MOCA (where he is a trustee), the County Museum of Art or the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art have fallen through, Panza is clearly still hoping for a miracle.

He hopes that miracle could yield a museum for their 40 to 50 “light and space” works by James Turrell, Irwin and others. Saying they could fill 100,000 square feet with works by those artists alone, the Panzas said the many room-sized pieces are simply too numerous and too large to be exhibited at the Massachusetts site. Given that so many of these artists are or have been based in Los Angeles, said Panza, he continues hoping someone will come forward with land and a building.