The Hammer’s New Role in the Art Community : Museums: Director Henry Hopkins outlines plans for the institution when UCLA takes over after the first of the year.

UCLA plans to create a new identity for the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center. The museum will retain its name after the first of the year, when the university intends to take over the Westwood facility. UCLA also will honor the museum’s commitment to exhibit the late oilman’s art collection--to the degree that pending litigation makes that possible--but nearly every other aspect of the museum is likely to change.

The Hammer museum is expected to put a public face on UCLA’s art department while becoming an important new fixture in Los Angeles’ cultural community, according to Henry T. Hopkins, department chair and director of the university’s Wight Art Gallery, who will serve as director of the museum for the first year. According to plans developed during the past year, the university will transform the museum into a multidisciplinary cultural center that will serve the community and members of sophisticated art circles as well as UCLA students, he said.

Hopkins, 63, came to Los Angeles in 1986 to direct the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation after 12 years of directing the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He left the foundation last year to chair UCLA’s art department and direct the Wight Art Gallery. Now he has an additional job. “I agreed to do it for a year; then something will have to go if it becomes too demanding,” Hopkins said. “But this isn’t the kind of thing that makes you tired. This is energizing.”

Under terms of a preliminary agreement, announced in July, the university will manage the museum’s staffing, exhibitions, development activities, financial and personnel policies, and operating budget for a period of up to 99 years.

The museum will operate on an annual budget of close to $4 million. About $2.5 million to $2.7 million of that total will be generated by the museum’s endowment; roughly $900,000 will be provided by UCLA’s existing arts exhibition budgets; the remainder will come from private support and revenues from admissions and bookstore sales.

Many of UCLA’s plans for the museum depend upon completing unfinished spaces and reorganizing existing facilities, Hopkins said. Finishing a 250-seat auditorium on the ground floor is essential to his dream of presenting a rich, full schedule of performances, lectures, symposiums, poetry readings, dance and film festivals that will entice arts aficionados to visit the museum frequently.

Hopkins’ vision calls for enhancing the pedestrian entrance on Lindbrook Drive to make the museum more user-friendly and extend its audience. Visitors who enter through the Lindbrook arch should be able to attend programs in the auditorium, relax in the courtyard, buy a snack and go to the bookstore without purchasing a ticket to the museum, he said. Realizing that plan would entail adding limited food service and moving one of the two bookstores.

A 3,000-square-foot, ground-floor space that was designed to be a library probably will be completed as a gallery for the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, currently housed at the Wight Art Gallery on campus. “The Grunwald collection has 36,000 objects, most of which haven’t been seen and should be,” Hopkins said.

If the Wight Art Gallery program moves to the Hammer museum, as planned, the campus gallery will be used for studios, faculty and student exhibitions, and a forum for student discussions, Hopkins said. “I would like to provide involvement opportunities for students . . . and give the kids reasons to hang around in the evenings.”

The university will lose the Wight Art Gallery’s 11,000 square feet of public exhibition space with the move, but it will gain a museum with about 22,000 square feet of galleries (including the unfinished library). If the Hammer collection remains intact after the resolution of pending litigation, UCLA will have the use of about 16,000 square feet of that space most of the time. For about 10 weeks each year, the university will be able to take over additional galleries and install larger exhibitions.

The space available for exhibitions would grow by an additional 3,000 square feet if a space above the lobby that was designed to accommodate a restaurant is turned into a gallery, Hopkins said. In light of the state’s fiscal crisis and the museum’s limited budget, private fund-raising will be required to complete that room, as well as the Grunwald gallery and the auditorium, he said.

UCLA plans to take over programming at the first of the year, after the closing of the museum’s big fall exhibition, “Splendors of the Ottoman Sultans,” featuring 260 works from Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace Museum. Stephen Garrett, director of the Hammer museum and administrative curator Alla Hall will leave the museum when UCLA assumes responsibility for management. The museum and bookstores will be professionally managed, but students are likely to be hired in secondary positions to provide them with income and experience, Hopkins said.

January through August will be a transitional period at the museum. The facility may be closed for awhile, but Hopkins said he hopes to keep it open and do some experimental programming. (Museum memberships will be extended to make up for any break in the exhibition schedule.)

The first UCLA exhibition at the Hammer museum will be presented in September, 1993. That show has not been organized, but Hopkins said he expects the exhibition program to emphasize three areas: socially conscious themes, California art, and examinations of architecture, design and photography. “All the exhibitions will have a feeling of contemporary responsiveness, but all the art shown will not be contemporary,” he said.

Hopkins will be meeting with other Southern California museum directors to shape the Hammer museum’s niche in the cultural landscape. He will also be working on a public program that will serve the community as well as UCLA’s art department. “We do not have to cater to a gigantic audience. We won’t do blockbusters,” Hopkins said. “I would hope in this particular location to deal with community issues . . . We can present a socially aware, diversified program that doesn’t focus on the Westside but is of interest to the Westside.”

Another role the museum may play is to provide exposure for important Los Angeles-based collections that are largely known only to art-world insiders. A show of little-known photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum is on the books for 1994, and Hopkins hopes to show works from the Eli Broad Family Foundation and the Lannan Foundation.

Hopkins also foresees using the museum “to fulfill the university’s responsibility for the evolution of art students.” Advanced graduate students will occasionally show their art at the museum “to help them make the transition from school to professional work,” he said.

The Board of Regents approved the merger in July, but a final agreement has not been signed. While winning the regents’ blessing was “a significant hurdle . . . there are significant open points that we hope will be resolved in the next several weeks,” UCLA campus counsel Ruth Simon said.

Meanwhile, litigation against Hammer and his empire--including the museum--continues in Los Angeles Superior Court. Joan Weiss, the niece and heir of Hammer’s wife, Frances, has challenged Hammer’s ownership of the collection and other assets acquired during the couple’s 33-year marriage. Frances Hammer, who died in 1989, a year before Armand Hammer’s death, waived her ownership rights to the artwork in several signed documents. But the suit charges that Hammer duped her out of her fair share of community property.

The museum itself is not in jeopardy, but the collection is. Hammer donated three groups of artworks to the museum: the “Codex Hammer,” an illustrated scientific manuscript by Leonardo da Vinci; about 100 Old Master, Impressionist and 19th-Century paintings, and more than 10,000 works by French satirist Honore Daumier. According to terms of the gift, the museum is required to display the Leonardo manuscript continuously. No less than 10% of the Daumiers and 80% of the paintings must be on view 80% of the time.

If Weiss wins a substantial amount of the artwork, one result is that UCLA would have much more exhibition space to work with. In addition, the nature of the collection would change significantly--depending on how the artworks are divided--and exhibition requirements would have to be altered.

The litigation will have no impact on UCLA’s agreement with the museum, according to Simon. The university would not have proceeded with negotiations to manage the museum if the space currently available were inadequate for a vital program, she said. Increased exhibition space could have a profound effect on programming, however.

As to the resolution of the Weiss suit, opinions vary. “Lawyers always like to think that these matters will be settled and that reasonable minds will prevail. I think that’s the current climate,” said Arthur Groman, Hammer’s longtime attorney, noting that a settlement might be possible in six months or so.

But Weiss’ attorney, Richard Cleary, has a different view. “No settlement is imminent. We are still preparing for trial. A status conference will be held later this month and a trial date will be set,” he said.

A Planned Merger in Westwood

The Wight Art Gallery at UCLA is scheduled to take over management of the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center at the first of the year. Plans at the Hammer call for completion of a 250-seat auditorium and expansion of gallery spaces. But the two institutions will maintain separate ownership of their art collections. These include:

Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center

* About 100 Old Master, Impressionist and 19th-Century paintings, including a portrait by Rembrandt.

* The “Codex Hammer,” an 18-page illustrated scientific manuscript by Leonardo da Vinci.

* 10,000 lithographs and other works by 19th-Century French satirist Honore Daumier. His “Legislative Belly” caricatures right-wing politicians.

UCLA

* 35,000 works on paper from the 15th Century to the present at Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, including Matisse’s print “The Burial of Pierrot.”

* The Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden, an open-air museum of 72 modern and contemporary works by European and American sculptors.