40 Masterpieces Involved : L.A. to See Soviet Art Collection

MOSCOW —  American industrialist Armand Hammer said today that 40 impressionist and post-impressionist masterpieces from Soviet museums will be displayed in Washington and Los Angeles next year in the first art exchange under the new U.S.-Soviet cultural agreement.

Hammer said the exchange was under negotiation for two years but Soviet officials agreed only after the new cultural, scientific and educational accord was signed at the Nov. 19-20 Geneva summit.

He said he and Yevgeny V. Zaitsev, the first deputy culture minister, signed a contract today under which two American collections will be sent to the Soviet Union in exchange for what he called “the greatest collection of impressionism and post-impressionism ever to have left the Soviet Union.”

The works were first displayed in 1983 in Lugano, Switzerland, where Hammer said he saw the paintings by Paul Cezanne, Claude Monet, Pierre August Renoir, Paul Gaugin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.

They come from Moscow’s Pushkin Museum and the Hermitage Art Museum in Leningrad, which boasts one of the world’s finest and most extensive collections of impressionist and post-impressionist works.

Hammer said the Soviet exhibit will open at the National Gallery of Art in Washington next May 1 for two months, and will then be shown for two months in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Frances and Armand Hammer wing.

Hammer, the 87-year-old chairman of Occidental Petroleum Corp. who had had a close relationship with the Soviets for many years, said, “This is the first time a collection of this caliber has ever been shown in the U.S.A.”

Soviet museums will be loaned “The Armand Hammer Collection: Five Centuries of Masterpieces,” and a collection of 40 impressionist and post-impressionist paintings from the National Gallery of Art.