At County Museum : Soviet Art Show Hours Extended

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, expecting large crowds, will extend its exhibition hours for its summer show of Impressionist and early modern art from the collections of the Soviet Union.

The exhibition,”Impressionist to Early Modern Paintings From the U.S.S.R.,” will be on view from June 26 through Aug. 12 and is expected to be “the blockbuster show of the season,” museum officials said.

Tickets will go on sale June 12 through Ticketmaster and at the musem kiosk, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Admission, which costs $4 for adults and $2 for children ages 5 to 12, will be for a specific day and hour.

Forty Paintings

The museum, usually closed on Mondays, will be open for the exhibit from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays and Tuesdays and from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays. On selected days, the show will close at 5 p.m.

The 40 paintings from the Hermitage and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts will include works by masters from Paul Cezanne to Pablo Picasso. Thirty-three of the paintings have never been seen in the United States.

The exhibition will include eight works by Cezanne, Claude Monet’s “Woman in a Garden,” eight Tahitian scenes, including “Reveries,” by Paul Gauguin, a portrait of actress Jeanne Samary by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and a portrait of Dr. Felix Rey by Vincent van Gogh.

Twentieth-Century art will be represented by Picasso, whose “Still Life With Skull” uses uncharacteristic bright colors and the stark image of a skull, and Henri Matisse’s major works “Nasturtiums with ‘La Danse’ ” and “Goldfish.”

Nationalized Collections

Many of the paintings in the Hermitage and the Pushkin were acquired by Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin, whose extensive collections were nationalized after the Russian Revolution. The works at first were housed in the Moscow Museum of Western Art and some subsequently were traded to the Hermitage in Leningrad.

This is the first American exhibition to result from a cultural exchange negotiated between the countries by Armand Hammer, chairman of Occidental Petroleum Corp. and a trustee of the county museum.

The agreement also calls for two collections from the United States to be shown in the Soviet Union this year. The shows will feature Hammer’s collection, which represents five centuries of art, and 40 Impressionist and post-Impressionist works from the National Gallery in Washington.