ART REVIEW : Museum Updates Its Look : The UCLA/Armand Hammer Center puts away its Old Masters for a collection of work from the 1980s. Mostly worthwhile art is found in ‘The Assertive Image.’

There’s something delicious about galleries that ordinarily house Old Master paintings being rehung with contemporary art--and looking infinitely better for it. A pious veneration of established names from history can blind a viewer to the reality that even the greatest artists are capable of routine mediocrity, while artists of our own day can produce work equal to most anything in the past.

This principle is being amply demonstrated at the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center. The young museum’s largely second-rate collection of Old Master and 19th-Century paintings has been taken down, temporarily replaced with a loan exhibition of art (mostly paintings) from the 1980s.

There’s a lot more worth looking at in “The Assertive Image: Artists of the Eighties From the Eli Broad Family Foundation” than there is when the Hammer’s minor Fragonard, Renoirs and Fantin-Latours occupy the walls. (A number of those will be reinstalled in a different part of the museum in mid-July.) Architecturally, the museum’s handsome, sky-lit, permanent collection galleries were designed as a subtle mix of modern spareness and Beaux Arts detailing, and they have never looked better than they do right now.

Among the 76 works on view are 20 exemplary pieces by Cindy Sherman, who, with each passing season, more assuredly seems to rank at the very top of the most important artists to have emerged in the last decade. The show is also marked by estimable paintings and mixed-media works by Anselm Kiefer, Lari Pittman, Tim Ebner, Julian Schnabel, Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Salle and others.

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John Ahearn’s painted fiberglass wall reliefs, which are life casts made from kids and adults in ordinary Bronx neighborhoods, have been installed on outdoor walls at the gallery entrance. There, they give a good sense of the poignant heroizing of the everyday so compelling achieved in Ahearn’s best work.

Some artists, notably Barbara Kruger, are more erratically represented. Her signature blast of feminist-inspired, graphically acute agitprop, “Untitled (Your Body Is a Battleground),” rendered at billboard scale, blows away her lesser works on nearby walls.

Meanwhile, the thin representation of Mike Kelley’s scatalogically incisive work, soon to be surveyed in a high-profile retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, feels perfunctory. The graffiti-like paintings of Keith Haring are not among his best, and Jonathan Lasker’s small abstractions, which actually read as paradoxical attempts to represent a critical idea of what abstraction is, are mostly mediocre examples.

There are also works by artists of considerably over-inflated reputation. Robert Morris’ baroque efforts to viscerally picture modern violence and genocide are stylish bombast. Peter Halley’s flashy, Day-Glo abstractions add up to little but vacuous yard goods.

Overall, though, considerably more worthwhile than forgettable art of the 1980s will be found in the exhibition, which makes it a pleasure to see. That said, however, there’s also a decided oddness to the show.

A sampler drawn from a privately formed assembly of works of art, it reveals more about an individual’s taste than about the period under review. For instance, all the art is by well-known artists who were commercially successful during the high-flying marketplace of the 1980s. You won’t find any surprising work by artists outside the commodity glare, although good, and sometimes even great, artists can be found there.

The theme of “assertive imagery” is also dubious. Hardly a phenomenon unique to the 1980s, a desire for an art of dramatic confrontation could describe a judiciously selected body of work from almost any decade in our volatile century.

Nor does it appropriately describe Ebner’s conceptually elegant, modular works, or Sean Scully’s single canvas of painted stripes. And if there is a polar opposite to the concept of assertive imagery, surely the joke-painting and wall-mounted fiberglass cast of an automobile hood by Richard Prince together define it. The exhibition’s ostensible theme seems more a rationalized afterthought, mostly useful for promotional packaging.

Also, despite its subtitle, more than a third of the show does not come from the Broad Family Foundation; instead, it has been lent from the personal collection of Eli and Edythe Broad. Significant distinctions separate foundation collections, which are legally bound by public responsibilities, from private collections, which are not. Disappointingly, especially for a university museum, the show does not articulate those differences.

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Eli Broad recently joined the board of the Hammer Museum, as part of its warranted restructuring from an independent entity to an affiliate of UCLA. He houses much of his family’s foundation collection in a seaside building in Santa Monica. Not a museum open to the general public, the foundation is a study center that also has operated as a kind of art-lending library to cash-strapped museums, especially in the United States and Europe.

However, its galleries are also accessible to an art-interested public, who can (and do) request tours of its periodically changing installations. To a local art audience that has been actively engaged since the foundation opened its building in December, 1988, few of the works that have been transported the few miles from Santa Monica to Westwood will be unfamiliar.

Simply put, it’s hard to say to what end “The Assertive Image” has been organized. The show offers many individual works to relish, but it’s also something of a puzzlement.

* UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., (310) 443-7000, through Oct. 9. Closed Mondays.