Retrospective of Soviet Artist Is Slated for New Hammer Museum : Art: Despite reports of legal and financial problems, Armand Hammer announced that a show of Soviet painter Kasimir Malevich’s works will open at his art museum in November, 1990.

A landmark retrospective of Soviet painter Kasimir Malevich is slated to come to the Armand Hammer Museum of Art late next year, according to Armand Hammer, chairman of Occidental Petroleum Corp. Hammer is currently building the museum for his personal art collection in Westwood amidst a barrage of legal and financial problems.

A shareholder lawsuit has charged that too much of the company’s money has been used to support the museum and Hammer’s other personal charities. More recently, reports of cost overruns suggest that the museum may be scaled back and some major components, such as the auditorium, book store and restaurant, may be delayed.

Hammer declined to discuss these problems but insisted that the museum will open on time--well before the Malevich show. The museum will open in May with an exhibition of works from Hammer’s collection, he said. The Malevich show will be from Nov. 25, 1990, to Jan. 13, 1991, in galleries reserved for traveling exhibitions, he said.

Los Angeles will be the second of three stops and the only West Coast engagement for the exhibition, Hammer said. The show will be at the National Gallery from Sept. 16 through Nov. 4, 1990. After its Los Angeles stop, it will go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art from Feb. 3 through March 24.

Malevich is a seminal modernist, highly regarded in the West, but his abstract paintings were out of favor and out of sight in the Soviet Union before glasnost . There has never been a major exhibition of his work in the United States. This year, for the first time in 60 years, the Soviets staged their first Malevich exhibition, which later traveled to Amsterdam.

The American exhibition will include more than 100 paintings and works on paper, primarily from Soviet museums with additional loans from European and American institutions.

“It’s a real coup,” Hammer said. “I negotiated on the exhibition for a year and a half.”

Hammer said he originally worked on the show with former Minister of Culture Vasily Zakharov, who told him he could borrow anything he wanted for the opening of his museum. The loan wasn’t free, however.

The three museums had to guarantee the Soviets $1.5 million to pay for the exhibition. The cost will be divided equally among the three institutions, Hammer said. Philip Morris Cos., Inc. will sponsor the show in Washington and IBM will pay the Met’s share. Hammer said he personally, not Occidental, would pay $500,000 for the exhibition to come to Los Angeles.