'Hearst the Collector' comes to LACMA
More than 150 highly prized objects once owned by William Randolph Hearst put the collector in a knowledgeable light.
"ACOLLECTION of everything. So big it can never be cataloged or appraised. Enough for 10 museums. The loot of the world."
That's the description of the art collection in "Citizen Kane," Orson Welles' masterpiece inspired by William Randolph Hearst. And the 1941 film has left an indelible impression of a voracious accumulator who focused on quantity, not quality.
Art history has been no kinder to Hearst, whose mining inheritance financed a media empire and an enormous art collection that filled six palatial dwellings -- including Hearst Castle, the 250,000-acre, 165-room estate that overlooks San Simeon on the Pacific Coast. A bulk buyer of art and antiquities, he is often characterized as a vacuum cleaner who swept through Europe, sucking up everything that looked suitably old and ornate -- be it good or bad, real or fake.
"The Art Dictionary," a 34-volume scholarly tome, credits Hearst with acquiring more than 200 "superb examples" of Navajo blankets and serapes, but otherwise deems him "indiscriminate." It gets worse: "Hearst was a promiscuous, uncontrollable, megalomaniacal collector of art, antiquities and architectural elements of very uneven quality. . . . Although he had a peculiar interest in armour, tapestry, Hispano-Moresque pottery, Greek vases, English silver and more, a sense of spoils of war haunts the huge Hearst collection."
That is not the message to be delivered in “Hearst the Collector,” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from Nov. 9 to Feb. 1. Hearst did make ill-advised purchases, says LACMA curator Mary Levkoff, who organized the exhibition. But he also bought scores of items that are now highly prized pieces in major museums around the world.
In the culmination of an exhaustive research project, she has rounded up about 150 objects from 25 lenders to set the record straight and give a much-maligned collector his due.
The Louvre has provided a mother-of-pearl-clad, jeweled box that made its way from Southeast Asia to France, where an early 16th century royal goldsmith framed it in silver gilt. From the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, there's an early 17th century Italian suit of armor fashioned of steel and gold, a 16th century European tapestry and a silver chalice made in medieval Northern Europe.
