The idea to create the Museo delle Culture was born in 1984. At that time Serge Brignoni decided to donate to the City of Lugano what was left of his extraordinary collection of ethnic art, on condition that a suitable museum would be set up to display and preserve it.
The chosen location was the Villa Heleneum, a beautiful neoclassical villa on the lake shore, just at the beginning of the trail that leads from Castagnola to the old village of Gandria.
It took five years for a group of young scholars, under the supervision of Brignoni himself, to complete the task. Thus, on 23 September 1989 the Museum opened to the public.
From the very beginning Brignoni's "primitivist" conception conflicted with the more markedly anthropological vision of the group that had supported the opening of the Museum. Brignoni was somehow interested in underlining how the works exhibited at the Heleneum were part of the sources that had renewed the artistic languages of the twentieth century.
The young group of researchers, on the other hand, saw it as an opportunity to build a centre of competence for non-western cultures and societies, as most other Swiss and European ethnological museums did.
It was not a simple difference of views: they were two real paradigms in comparison. On the one hand, the visionariness of the artist who had shared his passion for art nègre with Giacometti and Mirò; on the other, the idea of introducing an actor who would support the themes of multiculturalism and sustainability into the cultural fabric of Ticino.
The results of the first years of management of the newborn organization showed that both perspectives were probably too ambitious for the socio-cultural reality and local interests of the time. And if this caused on the one hand a progressive crisis of the project management (restarted only in 2005), on the other hand it led Brignoni to fall out of love with a creature that he could no longer see as really his own.
Of the original eight hundred works that he had planned to donate to the City of Lugano, 541 arrived at the time of the inauguration and another 127 arrived the following years. A fairly important part of the collection remained in his house in Bern and was sold or destined elsewhere.
The most important group of artworks that did not arrive in Lugano was donated in 1998 to the Kunstmuseum Bern which, in turn, shortly afterwards, decided to give it to the Musée d'ethnographie of Neuchâtel.
One of the achievements of the "rebirth" of the Museo delle Culture was to reunite Brignoni’s collection. This took over ten years of work. Ten years in which passion, quality and results of our research in the field of anthropology of art convinced everyone that the vision cradled by Serge Brignoni had finally found his home at Villa Malpensata and that, therefore, it would be worth reuniting what had been set apart.

Exhibition Title

A treasure found. New works from the Brignoni Collection

Location

MUSEC, Villa Malpensata, Riva Caccia 5 / Via Mazzini 5, 6900 Lugano

Dates

15 February 2019 - 8 March 2020