Art World The Guggenheim Gets $750,000 to Help Answer Knotty, Existential Questions About the Nature of Conceptual Art The Mellon Foundation grant will fund the third stage of the museum's Panza Collection Initiative. Eileen Kinsella, August 29, 2018 Conservator Francesca Esmay (second from right) discusses Lawrence Weiner’s work, which was installed for study during the Panza Collection Initiative Advisory Committee meeting, July 2013. Photo: David Heald © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation After years spent carefully studying and researching a prized blue-chip collection of postwar art acquired from a private collector, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is getting ready to share its findings with the rest of the world. The museum has embarked on the third and final phase of a years-long collaboration with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that the New York Times has described as “one of the most ambitious conservation projects ever to address the deep uncertainties raised by Minimalism and Conceptualism.” The endeavor marks the first time the field has sought to reach consensus on how to display and preserve artwork that might otherwise exist only as a diagram or an idea. ADVERTISING inRead invented by Teads Now, the Mellon Foundation is awarding the project a hefty grant of $750,000 (following the first two phases, which were funded by awards of $1.25 million and $1.23 million, respectively). The so- called Panza Collection Initiative has been quietly chugging along since 2010 and centers on the study of the most perplexing, fragile, and intellectually confounding works the museum purchased in the early ’90s from controversial Italian collector Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. (At the time, the Guggenheim made headlines for selling off works by Modigliani and Kandinsky to fund the purchase.) As part of the initiative’s third phase, the museum will publish an archive of all its research and interviews online and convene a symposium next spring in partnership with the Los Angeles-based Getty Conservation Institute. The Guggenheim also plans to publish a book of its research and conservation findings in 2020. Conservator Francesca Esmay (left) presents two different fabrications of Dan Flavin’s untitled (to Henri Matisse) (1964), which were installed for study during the Panza Collection Initiative Advisory Committee meeting, July 2011. Photo: Kristopher McKay © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation The overall project “was devised as a direct collaboration between the field of conservation and the field of art history and with a curatorial perspective,” conservator Francesca Esmay told artnet News. In addition to interviews with artists, the endeavor involved in-depth archival research, conversations with studio assistants and fabricators, and an ongoing exchange with an international advisory committee of conservators and historians. Although the Panza Collection includes 350 works in all, the museum has narrowed its focus to the work of seven artists: Dan Flavin, Robert Irwin, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Lawrence Weiner, and Doug Wheeler. (That left researchers with around 140 works to consider in-depth.) Although Flavin and Judd are no longer alive, the project offered most of the artists a rare opportunity to communicate for posterity how they want their art to be presented and preserved..