The memoirs of one famous collector compare the collecting of art to big-game hunting – picking up the scent of a prey, tracking it down, bagging the prize and then happily exhibiting the trophy in one’s gallery. However, ask Giovanni Agnelli, honorary president of FIAT, if the thrill of the chase played any part in the creation of his own art collection, and the denial is as amused as it is categorical: “Not in the least. It was aesthetic pleasure, simply the pleasure of being able to look at a work of art. There was no yearning for possession, only the desire to have the chance to admire a work of artistic creation. In my life I have drawn great joy from observing and studying these things. And now I hope that many other people will be able to share this joy and this desire. I would like all of those who visit the Lingotto Foundation in my city of Turin, and see the works of art that I have donated to the new Gallery, to remember not only the words of critics and scholars, but also this key phrase: “the joy of admiring art”.

The beginnings of the “Giovanni and Marella Agnelli Gallery” date back to the 1960s. “As early as 1961,” Giovanni Agnelli recalls, “I had thought of asking the architect Carlo Scarpa to design a museum that would be set up at Villar Perosa. Scarpa was the great museum architect; he had designed the space for the Paul Klee show at the 1948 Venice Biennale, and then had restructured the Uffizi in Florence and Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo in 1954. I was thinking of something that marked a moment of passage for those on their way to Sestriere and the mountains, something that would provide them with an opportunity for visual meditation. Then, however, I changed my mind; a museum like that would have attracted far too many tourists to a peaceful valley, destroying the peaceful rhythm of life enjoyed by the inhabitants. We could have ended up doing more harm than good. So, I decided to wait. Scarpa died in 1978; then thirty tumultuous years passed before I began to think over the idea once again. I had the right man for the job – Renzo Piano, an architect who was capable of taking up the heritage left by Scarpa – and so we set to work once more. However, you’d be making a mistake if you look for some sort of theme linking all the works on display at the Lingotto Gallery. The sole link between them is the pleasure I have derived from looking at them – the first time I saw them and the numerous times since, when I have been able to stop and study them. This is the invitation that I extend to the visitors to the place: look at these things of beauty; let their refinement and taste work on you.“

Between that original idea of 1961 and the opening of the Turin Gallery in 2002 came the work in Venice with the Palazzo Grassi exhibition centre. “Venice was the obvious choice for a work of cultural sponsorship,” Giovanni Agnelli comments. “It’s a world capital of art, with a long tradition in the field. The experience at Venice has been very useful, as a sort of workshop, in a period when the relation between public institutions, private industry and the world of culture have been changing rapidly. Palazzo Grassi is a real success story, and I am very pleased with the way things have gone. However, I did feel guilty – and that is the right word – towards my own city of Turin, which had given me so much. I thought I had neglected it somewhat. So, I overcame the last hesitations, and we started work on the project for Art Gallery at Lingotto. It was to be a centre which would bring new life to this crucial area of the city, transplanting it right into the heart of the future.

“Those who come to visit Lingotto will see an area of the outskirts of Turin – between the Alps and the hill on which the city stands – that I have always loved. One of Renzo Piano’s special gifts as an architect is that his designs seem to inject new life into the area around a new building, a new project; the entire place becomes a sort of resonance chamber for the building under construction. The houses, the urban fabric, the metropolis itself become a sort of network, at the centre of which the traveller finds a moment of aesthetic repose and reflection.“

And in describing the key works contained in the Gallery, Giovanni Agnelli’s enthusiasm becomes even clearer. “The collection of Matisses at Lingotto is unparalleled in Italy, with works like the 1937 Woman and Anemones and the 1943 Tabac Royal.” The extraordinary figure in Woman with Anemones fixes the spectator with an oblique glance; lost in her own indolent nostalgia, she sits there with an open manuscript on her lap. Is it a musical score, a book – or just a magazine? There’s no way of telling. Whatever it is, it is a work of an early twentieth century that has already passed – as fugitive as that panorama of trees, greenery and sky that the artist lets us glimpse between the classical forms of the balustrade across the balcony.

“Like my passion for Picasso, my love of Matisse,” explains Giovanni Agnelli, “has always been accompanied by a question: Does Italy, Italian culture, really know how to appreciate these artists? Can we ‘read’ their masterpieces? Matisse is a rarity in our museums; and I don’t think price is the sole explanation for this. Perhaps there’s a failing in our tastes. Matisse presents us with a concrete, contemporary world, which is remote – very remote – for those who were raised on the aesthetic mysticism of Beato Angelico.

“It was colour which made me fall in love with Matisse. I imagine him, already old – almost blind – and still creating masterpieces with his cut-outs, simple pieces of paper stuck onto a background. Painting becomes pure colour; life is simplified to the warm tones of colour. And colour is a decisive condition not only in art but also in our own memories, our perceptions. Filtered through the work of a master such as Matisse, colour imbues a city of the north – for example, Oslo or Stockholm – with all the light of the Mediterranean. I have often wondered why in Northern Europe one encounters so many Matisses; perhaps to bring something of the colour of our own sea to walls and buildings where the light is always slightly greyish. Wherever you are in the world, whatever the time of year, the season changes when you are looking at a Matisse. Everyday is spring or summer, the seasons full of youth. I have gathered together here works that inspire joy in life – full, intense joy; choosing them in preference to other masterpieces – for example, certain works by Bellini – which are extraordinary. but in the end infect us with their own melancholy.”

Renoir’s La Baigneuse Blonde(The Blonde Bather) of 1882 seems to contradict the bright world of colour in Matisse. The picture is dominated by the milky white of the nude, by the blue of sea and sky, and the golden yellow of hair which, like a sort of banner, seems to mark the woman’s distinction from nature. Nevertheless, here again is a masterpiece in which the dialectic of colour predominates. “It was the great English critic Kenneth Clark who spoke to me about it. It is considered amongst the very best Renoirs, and I had often talked about it. You can perhaps find Renoir boring; sometimes it is difficult to love his work. But this picture has a hidden fascination. And to think, Clark wanted to sell it so that he could buy a place in the country.”

The Lingotto collection is also noteworthy for its six Canalettos, which include The Marriage of Venice and the Sea and a View of the Grand Canal at Venice. With regard to the eighteenth-century Giovanni Antonio Canal, Giovanni Agnelli comments: “The danger is that a Canaletto often becomes merely decorative – the true, great decorative picture. You have to look a second time, to overcome the superficiality that results from the ‘postcard’ Canaletto. I suppose this is the fate of all collections. You look at it, and you see your own life mirrored in it. Memories, balance-taking, soul-searching – they’re inevitable.”

The American banker John C. Whitehead, army officer during the Second World War and later an Under-Secretary in the Reagan administration, speaks of his own art collection as a sort of autobiography: “whilst I was putting it together, my taste and culture were changing”; collector and collection were continually catching up with each other. “In a way, it was like that for me as well,” Agnelli recognises. “Sometimes I look at the pictures I’ve collected – those in the Lingotto Gallery and others – and I ask myself: Is this my collection , or that of some old lady from Park Avenue? Elegant but a little cold. There are works that at first struck one as subversive, revolutionary, marking a break with the past; but time has revealed just how much they fit in with contemporary culture, just how much they are a part of the century we are living in. Then there are cases where you only appreciate the revolutionary character of a work after decades. This has happened to me as well: I thought I was putting together an avant-garde collection, and it turned out to be classical.

“As an example of a daring masterpiece, I have always loved Balla’s Velocità Astratta [Abstract Speed] of 1913. It is a valuable document of its time, which, if it you want, was a period of ideological, economic and technological illusions. It was a time of utopias, one result of which was the great tragedies that now art is helping us to see in historical perspective. Did you know that this famous futurist work bears inscribed, in negative as it were, the outline of the “Quadrumviri”, the four famous fascist gerarchi. Balla may have been a card-carrying fascist, but he did understand the power of communication in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – a period that the English historian Hobsbawm called “The Age of Revolutions”. I am now past 80, and my life has coincided with the must troubled periods of the twentieth century. It’s only natural therefore that the aesthetics of the 1930s should have made their mark on me – and the same goes for the avant-garde work of the 1960s and 70s. The 1930s were the time of my father Edoardo, and – perhaps in a sentimental way – I have remained attached to the rhythm, to the taste of life then. With the present-day contemporaries I have had a less enthusiastic relationship; but Lingotto does have three works by Larry Rivers: the Portraits of Primo Levi, the Turin writer world-famous for his diary of Auschwitz, If this is a Man. Since the Second World War I have seen art “live”, as it appeared in the galleries of Paris, London, New York, Rome and Zurich. And sometimes, familiarity … dampens one’s enthusiasm a little.”

Have you ever painted or drawn, perhaps when a young man, as a hobby? “No, no,”Agnelli smiles. “I’ve never been a painter; but I have had a love of things beautiful since I was a boy. Not only in paintings, but also architecture, design. Perhaps Architecture is the art for which I have most passion; it embraces the whole of life, is the perfect harmony of aesthetics and existence – and yet has all the contradictions of aesthetics and existence. In architecture, our life – work, production, industry, family, technology, school, workshop, offices – all can become examples of practical aesthetics, with sometimes extraordinary results. Even now, when I walk up the ramp leading into Lingotto, its combination of beauty and functionality make a deep impression on me. It is the starting-point for Renzo Piano’s entire project, which embraces Alps, hills, and the enormous space of Porta Nuova and the railway that backs onto the site. This triangle was home to a large part of Turin’s history as an industrial city; and it’s important that it once more become a logical, ordered space.

“It thrills – and moves – me that the pictures collected during my life will hang in my city, in a building which is the work of architecture I hold most dear.”

That collection of pictures also includes Gino Severini’s Les Lanciers Italiens en galop [The Charge of the Italian Lancers] of 1915. You yourself were a cavalry officer serving in Russia and Africa, then with the allies in Italy, was this picture a sentimental choice? “I had to buy two dozen pictures by Severini to get those Italian lancers. For someone who has served in the cavalry, the charge is a magical moment, revealing the power and the tragic unity binding a regiment together. Severini’s picture is very beautiful, and I am very happy that it is now on show in Turin. For me, it represents very important – and also painful – personal memories, of my years as a young man during the war.”

Amedeo Modigliani is represented at the Gallery by a Nu couché [Reclining Nude]. In French museums he is sometimes appropriated as one of their own, and passed off as a peintre français. “The truth is Modigliani was from Livorno; he was an authentic Livorno Jew. I consider him unique, and like his work a great deal. This particular picture ended up in the custody of the Banca d’Italia when the Governor was Guido Carli. Rather incongruous, isn’t it, such an erotically-charged work amongst a load of bankers? With Modigliani, one likes to repeat the advice: first look the woman in the eyes, then look at the woman. His faces are hypnotic, they lead your gaze just where the artist wants. There really is nothing like them. Perhaps in appropriating him, the French are recalling that Paris was where he gained recognition, where he lived those wonderful years within the avant-garde community of the day, where he is buried. For us, he remains a livornese, a fellow-countryman.”

The Gallery will also boast two Picasso’s. In recent years there seems to have been a certain critical “re-evaluation” of the Spaniard’s work, often predicated more on the turbulent story of his life than on what he actually achieved as an artist. Time, however, has confirmed that Picasso was the greatest painter of the twentieth century; and, in the future, anyone who wants to understand that century will have to look at his paintings.

“I agree,” says Giovanni Agnelli. “He is an important artist, the most important. On show at Turin there will be L’Homme accoudé sur une table [Man resting his elbows on a table] painted in 1915-1916, during the most savage years of the First World War. It is a picture that has an architectural perfection of construction. There is no aspect of Picasso’s greatness that is not represented in this picture: colour, expressive power, the ability to quote the classical tradition and at the same time subvert it, re-found it. And yet this is also an unusual Picasso, with its unique and original air of melancholy.

I was able to purchase this masterpiece solely because a friend wanted to buy a house in Sardinia. You see the bizarre chances on which collecting depends! And it’s curious to think why one actually does sell a picture, perhaps one that in the past took a lot to acquire. But I’ll never tire of this Picasso. Never. It’s of a blue – a real blue, blue, blue. A limitless blue.

“Picasso managed to paint for half a century and always remain an avant-garde artist. Politically, his sympathies lay with the Left, and his Guernica became famous throughout the world, an image condensing all the battles of the twentieth century, from Verdun to Stalingrad. Thus the bombing of the Spanish city by the German “Condor Legion” left its mark on an entire generation. Think of Wolfram Richthofen, the German pilot who was cousin of the famous World War One ace Manfred von Richthofen, the “Red Baron”. Wolfram Richthofen too fought in the First World War, and then in 1936 went to Spain with the Condor Legion, and planned the raid which destroyed Guernica. Later, it would be he who tried, unsuccessfully, to keep supplies coming in for Field Marshal Paulus’s 6th Army when they had been encircled by the Russians at Stalingrad – attempts which saw the loss of one thousands pilots and five hundred planes. Richthofen himself would die in 1945. It is from these tragic stories, these shattered lives, that the fabric of the twentieth century was woven. And the ideological choice made by Picasso was not solely shared by numerous avant-garde artists of the day. Perhaps for them it was a way of remaining true to the rebellion of their youth, when they broke the canons of classical expression and renewed art… However, I would hope that visitors to the Gallery will not ignore a work such as Manet’s La Négresse of 1864, a powerful work of temperament and sensuality.“

Is there a work that you would have liked to see hanging in the Gallery, but that got away from you? “Yes; another Picasso, a Harlequin that my wife Marella liked a great deal. It ended up going to a Japanese buyer who was willing to pay a ridiculously high price.“

Many of the paintings on display are of female figures. “That’s true. But, believe me, not even ‘The Female Form’ is intended as the leitmotif of the Gallery. As I said, the criteria followed were colour, aesthetic pleasure and my first impression of the work. I don’t doubt that critics and scholars will now set about finding others. I will read their interpretations with pleasure, but won’t change my mind.“

When, in his Paris studio, Renzo Piano showed me the designs for the Gallery, he stressed the American concept of ‘museum education’ – that is, the role of galleries and museums as places of education for the young. Museums should not exhibit works with hauteur, surrounding art with an aura of majesty that might put people off, but should lay them out so that people learn as they pass from one to the other. Did you talk about this idea with Piano? “A great deal. He is firmly convinced that is the way things should be. I hope he is right, even if my own background is rather different. I have been to the great classical museums – the Louvre, the Metropolitan, the Uffizi – innumerable times, and sometimes there are school groups; but if they recognise me, the children ask about the players Juventus Football Club is about to buy, not about Matisse. The passion for art grows as one becomes more mature. When I was a child, my father took me to museums because he thought beautiful things educate one, that one’s taste can be refined from a very early age – and he was right. It is possible to use a picture gallery as a means of education, but in a rational way. I am curious to see the outcome of the ‘education’ experiment at Lingotto.“

What would you like people – young or not so young – to bear in mind as they visit the Giovanni and Marella Agnelli Gallery? “I would like them to remember that the greatest pleasure one can have is in creating something. Creativity is the sole real addition to our life, embracing all the others. And I would like people to draw pleasure from their visit. For me, nothing is more pleasant than the memory of those days when work was demanding, when I was travelling backwards and forwards between Frankfurt and Zurich laden down with thousands of dossiers written in the greyest of bureaucratic language, and suddenly, in the midst of it all, I got the chance to visit a gallery – perhaps opened after-hours thanks to the good offices of a friend. The truest and most deeply-felt reason behind the creation of our Gallery was the desire to share that pleasure of discovery in one’s first encounter with a work of art, to make it available not only to the citizens of my own city of Turin but to visitors from all over Italy and the world.“

Turin/New York, May-July 2002