Among the most frequently recurring artistic themes in the collections of the museum, one can identify the abstract vein which represents a unifying element which runs throughout the works constituting a kind of Ariadne’s thread uniting the entire collection.

In fact, the initial nucleus and the heart of the collection is represented by the collection of Maria Cernuschi Ghiringhelli exhibited in February 1985 to inaugurate the opening of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Villa Croce and purchased by the Municipality of Genoa in 1989. Maria, wife of Gino Ghiringhelli, painter and owner of the Milanese gallery Il Milione, began collecting in 1940, starting with a canvas by Ghiringhelli and an etching by Reggiani. Her collection was guided by totally personal criterion but maintaining a true sense of contemporary culture.

From 1932, the Il Milione gallery strove to promote the most advanced European artistic language, presenting international artists such as Fernard Léger, Pablo Picasso, and Wassili Kandinskij, who exhibited for the first time in Italy, and attracting artists and critics supportive of Lombard Abstract Art.

The first Italian Abstract Art Exhibition entitled Oreste Bogliardi, Virginio Ghiringhelli, Mauro Reggiani, opened in November 1934 at the Il Milione gallery, accompanied by a Declaration of the exhibitors signed by the three artists, a true manifesto of the group. The influence of the research of the Dutch Neoplasticist Movement is clear, expressed in 1917 by Piet Mondrian and Theo Van Doesburg, who wanted to bring art to absolute formal purity using geometric shapes and primary colours. The neoplasticist artist Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart had exhibited at the Milione immediately before and provided inspiration for several of the artists.

Another important factor was the influence of the architect Giuseppe Terragni and the group of rationalist architects from Como, as well as the influence of the figure of Carlo Belli, whose text Kn is considered the bible of the abstract artists.

The first exhibition was followed in 1935 by others dedicated to individuals such as Lucio Fontana with his abstract sculptures, followed by Atanasio Soldati, Fausto Melotti and Osvaldo Licini who, with his Open letter to the friends of the Million, enthusiastically joined the group. In the same year, the first collective exhibition of Italian Abstract Art was hosted in Turin in the studio of the artists Enrico Paolucci and Felice Casorati.

Composition n. 5 by Gino Ghiringhelli and Composition R 3 by Mauro Reggiani were among the 28 paintings exhibited in the 1st Italian Abstract Art Exhibition; both now form part of the museum's collections, as do Reggiani’s etchings from 1934. The starting point of these artists, as announced in the Declaration, was the need for a new classicism made of balance & synthesis. A personal view was expressed by Osvaldo Licini who defined painting as the art of freely conceived colours.

Among the leading figures of artistic research the museum preserves works from the 1930s of notable importance, such as the three precious Ardoise by Alberto Magnelli (1937), a rare oil on wood by Bruno Munari (1937), the Orange Composition (1938) by Mario Radice and three compositions by Atanasio Soldati.

In fact, the concepts supported by the abstractionism of the 1930s were taken up and re-proposed by the Concrete Art Movement - MAC, founded in 1948 in Milan by four artists: Gillo Dorfles, Atanasio Soldati, Bruno Munari and Gianni Monnet. Concrete Art produced self-sufficient images, shapes and colours created by the artists based on their intuitions. The connecting artist between the first abstractionism and this new movement was Atanasio Soldati, to whom we also owe contacts with the artists of Genoa, Plinio Mesciulam and Giuseppe Allosia. The museum houses important works from the 1950s by Mesciulam that show a vision of concrete abstract perception, and works by Giuseppe Allosia, who is closer to the eddies of the Nuclearists and to the dripping of Action Painting.