Egidio Marzona, the German-Italian collector, publisher, and patron whose vast holdings helped define the study and display of 20th-century avant-garde art, has died at 81. He died Sunday in Berlin, according to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, or SPK). Unlike many collectors of his generation, Marzona treated archives not as secondary material but as the core of the work itself, amassing not just paintings and objects but the paper trail of ideas—letters, diagrams, exhibition plans—that mapped how the avant-garde thought, circulated, and sustained itself. His holdings in both art and its ephemera focused on movements from the interwar period, like Dada and Bauhaus, to the postwar, such as Fluxus, conceptual art, and Arte Povera. Marzona’s holdings has since become foundational to how museums and scholars understand these different strains of art. Related Articles His commitment to public access was equally defining. Beginning in the early 2000s, Marzona transferred large portions of his holdings to German institutions, including more than 600 artworks and tens of thousands of archival materials now held by the SPK and dispersed …