U.S.-SOVIET ART SHOWS ON SCHEDULE

Despite strained relations between the United States and the Soviet Union after the recent American bombing of Libya, current art exchanges between the two superpowers are continuing on schedule, U.S. spokesmen say.

“Some of the paintings are arriving right now,” said Randall Kremer, a press officer at the National Gallery in Washington. Kremer confirmed that an exhibition of 41 Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and early modern paintings from the Soviet Union’s Hermitage and Pushkin museums will open at the National Gallery on May 1, as planned, and continue through June 15.

The same exhibition, including works by Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh and Gauguin, will then travel to the West Coast for a showing at the County Museum of Art, June 26 to Aug. 12. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art will host the show’s final engagement, Aug. 23 to Oct. 5.

In return, the National Gallery and industrialist Armand Hammer have sent art to the Soviet Union.

Forty Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings from the National Gallery went on view at the Hermitage in Leningrad in February.

“The exhibition is slated to run to the end of April but there may be an extension,” said Kremer. “They have intimated that they want one, but I don’t know how that will work out. The show has been incredibly popular.”

“The Armand Hammer Collection: Five Centuries of Masterpieces,” an exhibition of artworks that Hammer has sent around the world for several years, opened at the Hermitage in March. According to Frank Ashley, a spokesman for Hammer, the collection will next travel to the U.S.S.R. State Art Gallery in Moscow. The show will then move to Novosibirsk, Odessa and Kiev.

“The exhibition has been very well received,” said Ashley. “I don’t have definitive attendance figures, but at the opening, people were literally lined up five and 10 across for three or four blocks waiting to get into the Hermitage.”

Although the projected mid-May meeting between Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Soviet foreign minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze has been scuttled and the anticipated summit may be in jeopardy, spokesmen anticipate that the exchange exhibitions now in process will not be affected.