Rai5, an episode of Art Night dedicated to Italy's great private collections

It is dedicated to great art collections in the episode of Art Night that will air on Rai5 at 9:15 p.m. Friday, Nov. 5. What is behind the desire to own a work of art? Neri Marcorè, the program’s new host, asks why people collect. Few do it for pure economic investment: behind the purchase of a work of art there are in fact the simplest human desires, such as passion, the search for beauty, the affirmation of a social status, the search for one’s identity. Art Night then opens with the documentary L’arte della passione. Great Italian Collectors, by Emanuela Avallone and Linda Tugnoli, produced by Rai Cultura.

The documentary offers a journey through some of Italy’s great collections, starting with the “historic” one, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, housed in the marvelous Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, overlooking the Grand Canal, where director Karole Vail recounts the love of Peggy Guggenheim, her grandmother, for art, and then moves on to another woman who has always been in love with art, namely Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, who after a lifetime spent collecting the works of the heart, has opened the doors of her collection to the public in Turin. And again Palermo, where Francesca and Massimo Valsecchi host in the baroque Palazzo Butera in the Kalsa a magnificent collection of works representing the pinnacles of artistic production from different historical periods and cultures (they talk about it together with architect Giovanni Cappelletti and curator Claudio Gulli). Lavinia Biagiotti shows the Biagiotti Cigna Collection, one of the most extensive private collections in Italy, which her parents Laura and Gianni, moved by a passion for futurist art, collected in the continuous search for inspiration for their creations, and finally Alessandra Cerasi tells about the Cerasi Collection at Palazzo Merulana in Rome, while Germano “Gerry” Bonetti, a young and visionary lawyer from Milan, will give us a glimpse of collecting in the time of social. Also, thanks to Guido Guerzoni of Bocconi University in Milan and Alessandra Di Castro, president of the Associazione Antiquari d’Italia, Art Night will try to gather answers to one question: why do we buy art?

Art Night continues with the documentary Chinese Collectors. The Power of Art, a Zero one film production co-produced with Radio Bremen and ARTE, which instead shows another point of view, that of an exclusive look at the world of Chinese billionaires who for the first time open their doors to a Western film crew. Director and art historian Grit Lederer, along with journalist, sinologist and art historian Minh An Szabó de Bucs, will present China’s most prominent, influential and innovative art collectors, including Adrian Cheng, founder of Hong Kong’s K 11 Art trading center, which collaborates with the Pompidou Center and the Museum of Modern Art. Chinese collectors spend millions in U.S. dollars on works by Picasso, Modigliani, van Gogh or the French Impressionists. For their art treasures, Chinese collectors are building private museums in Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai and other expanding metropolises: new museums with tens of thousands of square meters, one larger than the other.

At the same time, they are bidding for Chinese imperial artifacts and presenting them as trophies. Recovering imperial cultural treasures from abroad plays an important role for so-called super collectors: fiscal and economic advantages may be a motivation; but above all, collectors are driven by patriotism and the desire to lead the Chinese people back to recover their cultural identity. With the help of auctions, private purchase agreements, wealthy private collectors are collaborating with state institutions in the mission to bring imperial artifacts back to China. And then for the past few years there has also been an impressive number of burglaries in the East Asian collections of major European museums. Is there perhaps a connection?

Art Night, a program by Silvia De Felice and Emanuela Avallone, Massimo Favia, Alessandro Rossi, directed by Andrea Montemaggiori.

Pictured: Alessandra Cerasi

Rai5, an episode of Art Night dedicated to Italy's great private collections

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