The House as Museum, The Museum as House: The Making of Great Collections
International conference
Tuesday, 6 March 2018, 10 am to 5 pm
Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Conference Hall
To prepare for the opening of the Cerruti Collection to the public in early 2019, Castello di Rivoli will be holding an important one-day international conference on 6 March entitled The House as Museum, The Museum as House: The Making of Great Collections with some of the leading experts in the field. The aim is to stimulate reflection on the importance of reciprocity between museums and private collections in connection with the extraordinary acquisition of the legendary Cerruti Collection – one of the most important private collections in Europe – by the Castello di Rivoli.
With the exception of large blockbuster museums in major urban centers, most art museums we know today were originally founded by collectors and art lovers who decided themselves, or whose heirs decided, to share their collections with the public. Whether with a civic educational mission, or in order to create a legacy through which their memory might be preserved by future generations, these museums are active around the world today. Some of them were founded by artists and other intellectuals, whose estates have thus become public. The modern “white cube” detached this domestic and private origin from a sense of the autonomy of the artwork. While today new museums appear all over the world, artists and visitors continue to seek out the personality and intimacy of exhibition spaces, as a way of grounding their experiences in life.
During this conference, the directors and representatives of illustrious Italian and international institutions − comprising the J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C., the Judd Foundation in Marfa and New York,Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris, the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna, the Villa Borghese in Rome, the Museo Poldi Pezzoli in Milan, the Villa e Collezione Panza in Varese and the Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli in Turin − will discuss the growing importance of dialogue between private collections and museums and its impact on the fundamental relationship between contemporary art and the legacy of the past. The participants will talk about their experiences and the close and positive relations between museums and private collections born out of the drive for knowledge peculiar to art.