L.A. Is 1 of 3 Exhibition Sites : Plans Outlined for Rare U.S.-Soviet Art Exchange

The first U.S.-Soviet art exchange arranged under the Geneva summit cultural pact took shape Friday as three museum directors, a Soviet diplomat and industrialist Armand Hammer outlined plans for a rare show of art from Soviet museums, including a stop in Los Angeles.

Elaborating on a project that was first announced Dec. 13, the participants announced at a bicoastal press conference the dates and other details for the U.S. exhibit, including tentative lists of the artworks scheduled to be exchanged.

Forty Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings from the Hermitage in Leningrad and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow will be displayed at the National Gallery in Washington from May 1 through June 25, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from July 2 through Aug. 26 and--in a recent addition to the original schedule--the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from Sept. 3 through Oct. 26.

In return, an exhibition called “Five Centuries of Masterpieces” and consisting of works from Hammer’s private collection will tour several museums in the Soviet Union, and 40 Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings from the National Gallery will be shown at the Hermitage.

“This is truly unprecedented,” said Hammer, who engineered the art exchange. “I’ve had some successes but nothing like this.”

Hammer called the new cultural agreement “a beginning” of understanding that will “definitely” bring other exchanges in education, communication and the arts. At least 10 major performing arts groups from each country are slated for future programs, but their names have not been revealed.

Orchestrating Friday’s press conference from the Los Angeles board room of Occidental Petroleum Corp.--with Los Angeles County Museum of Art Director Earl A. Powell at his side--Hammer spoke with Soviet Consul General Valentin Kamenev in San Francisco; Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and J. Carter Brown, director of the National Gallery in Washington.

Although the art exchange seems certain to take place, the actual list of paintings to be sent here is still in flux.

“The Russians have agreed, and the contract so reads that there can be additions to the collection or substitutions to replace some of the paintings that have been shown here (in a 1973 exhibition of similar artworks),” Hammer said.

Preliminary List

A preliminary list of paintings by Paul Cezanne, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso was released with the initial announcement of the exchange. The final roster will be determined by Jan. 10, according to Hammer.

Museum officials touted the changes now being made in the show as an opportunity to assemble an even better collection of artworks than was originally anticipated.

“By the time we are finished, we are going to have an extraordinary exhibition,” said Brown, who had sent a curator and conservator from the National Gallery to survey the Russian collections and make recommendations for substitutions.

De Montebello proclaimed the impending exchange “without a doubt the greatest exhibition of paintings between the Soviet Union and the United State that has ever taken place.”

Amid general euphoria about what promises to be a rare show of high-quality artworks, however, is the possibility that important paintings will be left behind. There has already been one significant subtraction. “The Red Room,” a prime work by Matisse, has been replaced by a lesser Matisse, known as “The Pink Room.”

Optimistic About Quality

Museum administrators nonetheless remain optimistic that the exhibition will offer fine examples of French painting of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Despite last-minute changes, the show promises to give Americans a rare opportunity to see French paintings acquired by two Russian collectors, Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin, whose holdings were institutionalized after the Russian Revolution.

The show also is expected to tell “the story of the birth of modernism,” according to Powell, who cited historical progressions of Cezanne’s and Picasso’s work as exhibition highlights.

Security forces are already gearing up to protect the visiting masterpieces, according to Hammer. “We’re not only dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars” but with artworks that are “priceless,” he said. “There never will be an exhibition that will have better security.”

The American tour of Soviet-owned art will be funded by Occidental Petroleum Corp.