11 Paintings Pulled From Hammer Opener

Citing safety concerns at industrialist Armand Hammer’s unfinished Westwood art museum, three East Coast museums have withdrawn 11 key paintings and other artworks from the center’s debut exhibition, “Kazimir Malevich, 1878-1935,” scheduled to open later this month.

The troubled Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, already beset by costly litigation and cost overruns, received final word of withdrawal of the artworks earlier this week from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Yale University Art Gallery and the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard University. The decisions were confirmed by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, organizer of the show.

The three Eastern museums said they had been unable to obtain satisfactory assurances about the safety of their pictures in view of the untested security and environmental-control systems in the new Hammer building.

The museum is scheduled to open Nov. 28, shortly after completion of construction. Usually, say museum experts, new museum buildings undergo a shakedown period of eight or nine months before collections are put on display to guard against unexpected glitches in heating, air conditioning, water-proofing and security systems that could have catastrophic effects on vulnerable artworks.

“We feel that in order to be comfortable (with having work in the Hammer museum) the facility has to be up and running for some time before lending to it,” said a Museum of Modern Art spokesperson. “We feel these particular works are too fragile to commit to an as yet untested facility.”

“I don’t really see that there is any way out of the situation from our perspective,” said Anthony Hirschel, assistant to the director at the Yale gallery. “We have a firm policy of not granting final approval (for a loan) to any museum that isn’t built yet.”

In a statement Thursday afternoon, Occidental Petroleum Corp., which was founded by Hammer and has bankrolled his museum, reacted calmly to the news of the withdrawals. “The museum is fully operational, all systems have been tested and are working properly,” Occidental said. “All security is in place and the museum is fully insured.”

Occidental, which issued the statement on Hammer’s behalf, noted that, “of the 170 works now in Washington, virtually all of them will be exhibited at the Hammer museum.” Occidental added that “this is the only retrospective of Malevich’s works ever seen on the West Coast and it provides a magnificent inaugural exhibition for the Hammer museum.”

The 92-year-old Hammer had hoped that the exhibition would be a blockbuster opening for the $96-million museum. He announced in January, 1988, that he would build his own museum and would pull out of an agreement to donate the art collection he assembled with his own and Occidental Petroleum Corp. money to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Construction began during the summer of 1988.

The Hammer museum is scheduled to open with the touring show of works by Russian Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich, widely perceived as one of the most significant artists of the 20th Century. The show closed Thursday at the National Gallery and is scheduled to move to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in February after it closes at the Hammer Jan. 13. The Hammer will be its only California venue.

The show, which is also sponsored by the Philip Morris Cos. Inc., is insured under a federal government program administered by the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Malevich show as seen in Los Angeles will retain the bulk of its works, which include important paintings never viewed outside of the Soviet Union, as well as work from European museum and private collections. The Soviet government cooperated in the organization of the show.

Born in 1878, Malevich underwent a stylistic evolution that resulted in Realist, Impressionist and Cubist work before he returned to realistic themes in the years just before he died in internal exile in 1935. He was a founder of the abstract Suprematist movement, which took form in 1913, but spent itself by the early 1920s.

“White Square on White,” completed in 1918 and one of the withdrawn paintings, is widely seen as one of the high water marks of the movement. One of his last paintings was a self-portrait in which the artist appears in Renaissance garb, completed in 1933.

The Malevich show that will be seen at the Hammer museum will be missing 12 of the 91 paintings, 3 of its 79 drawings and sculptures and 3 of 6 teaching charts made by Malevich to accompany a 1925 exhibit in Germany that make up the full exhibit.

Most significant among the works withdrawn from the Hammer exhibition is “White Square on White,” the most famous Malevich in North America. The painting, which critics have characterized as the central work from the high point of the Suprematist movement, is owned by the Museum of Modern Art. It was displayed in the National Gallery version of the show alongside two similar paintings from the same period, both of which are owned by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

The American museum withdrawals will break up two other sequences in the exhibition. One series of three pictures from 1912 and 1913, when Malevich’s style was undergoing major change, will be wiped out entirely. A second series of three, from 1914, will lose its most important single picture. (New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has also withheld one painting, but the Guggenheim decision was made months ago and grew out of a scheduling conflict, not over safety concerns.)

Withdrawal of the American-owned works will leave large gaps in the show’s continuity and, according to critics who viewed it at the National Gallery, frustrate major objectives of the exhibition.

Show organizers said the show was intended to bring together Malevich work created in several periods of the artist’s life but which had been dispersed to several continents when Malevich was suppressed in the 1920s and early 1930s by dictator Joseph Stalin.

Removal of the American museum-owned pictures, said London art historian and critic John Golding, “is going to damage it really quite substantially. It is unquestionably the most revealing and best Malevich show there has ever been. In some (periods of Malevich’s life), its content will be deleted by about half.”

The non-Los Angeles version of the exhibition “is the definitive Malevich show,” said French-born, Baltimore-based art critic Yve-Alain Bois, who reviewed it for the Journal of Art. “One of the incredible advantages was that it brought together (works never seen alongside one another) and made groupings that had never been seen before.”

The Museum of Modern Art said it had withheld its final decision on lending nine major Malevich pictures to the Hammer museum until late last week, when it received a “facilities report” from the Hammer museum. Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum dispatched a senior curator to the Hammer museum about three months ago to inspect the unfinished facilities, but the Dutch museum elected to continue its participation in the Malevich show.