When Hirshhorn Museum Chief Curator Kerry Brougher met Italian industrialist Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo for lunch a few years back, he had one question to ask: “Have you got anything left?”
Panza is, says Brougher, “the most important collector of contemporary art in the world, since the 1950s.” He had in recent decades been donating or selling at reduced prices large, thematically cohesive chunks of his holdings to the world’s great museums. In 1983, when Brougher was a young curator at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art, he persuaded Panza to to sell MoCA some 80 pieces, including early works by Franz Kline and Mark Rothko. In 1990, the Guggenheim bought more than 300 modern American minimalist paintings and sculptures from Panza.
Fortunately, Panza hadn’t gotten rid of everything. Still in his possession were a treasure trove of conceptual and enviornmental works dating primarily from the mid-60s to early 70s — exactly what was missing from the Hirshhorn’s holdings. And so it was that the museum became the proud owner of 39 new works by 16 paradigm-pushing artists. Typographic wizard Lawrence Weiner and Robert Barry, who was working in the realm of “nothing” decades before Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David got there, are among the nine artists whose works were previously unrepresented in the Hirshhorn’s permanent collection. “We got an incredible deal,” Brougher gushed at the exhibit’s opening.
Like Joseph Hirshhorn, Brougher says, Panza “committed to an artist fully,” buying multiple pieces by pioneers such as Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein before they’d established critical bonafides. “The Panza Collection” honors this tradition through multi-work examinations of several artists: Joseph Kosuth has an entire room to himself, housing five pieces that probe the arbitrary link between language, objects, and ideas. “Box, Cube, Empty, Clear, Glass” (1965) is the most obvious example.
Light and Space are two subjects of exploration here, compellingly dissected in three untitled pieces from Robert Irwin, and installations from Doug Wheeler and Larry Bell. Bell’s glass panels, vacuum-plated with metal particles to make them somehow both transparent and highly reflective, might be the most sophisticated funhouse-mirror ever made.
Equally compelling are the works that play with the notion of eternity. On Karwara has made more than 2,000 paintings since 1966, each one documenting the date of its creation — if it isn’t finished by midnight, he destroys it. Three such paintings are here, all from October 1971. Also from that year is his “One Million Years,” a set of 10 bound volumes listing each year from 998031 B.C. and 1969. (Presumably writing sentences on the blackboard was not a popular form of punishment in the grade schools of 1930s Japan.)
Poland’s Roman Opalka takes the idea of our slavery to time even further, painting sequences of numbers for eight hours each day, then records himself speaking the numbers aloud and photographs himself when he’s finished. “I call that the obsessive-compulsive section,” jokes Evelyn Hankins, the Hirshhorn’s Associate Curator of Modern Art. “It’s the relentlessness of the march of time that each of those piece makes clear in visual form.”
What all of this adds up to is the Hirshhorn at its Hirshhorn-iest. Modern-art haters will find pieces such as Barry’s “Steel Disc Suspended 1/8 in. Above Floor” especially hate-worthy. But for those of us who love the familiar feeling of walking out of Gordon Bunshaft’s unmistakble ring-shaped building feeling challenged and renewed, the arrival of “The Panza Collection” is a major event.
If you go
“The Panza Collection”
Where: Hirshorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Seventh St. and Independence Avenue SW
When: Through Jan. 11, 2009
More info: Free; 202-633-4674; www.hmsg.si.edu
