Hearst, off the hill

Hearst Castle, a trove of 25,000 artworks and artifacts collected by its founder, has lent about three dozen objects. Prime among them is a 6 1/2 -foot-tall marble statue of Venus by Italian neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova that hasn't budged from its position since Hearst had it installed nearly 80 years ago. LACMA, which claims Hearst as its greatest early benefactor, will also be generously represented, but many of Hearst's donations -- including most of the works in the museum's Greek and Roman and medieval galleries -- will be on view in the permanent collection galleries, as usual.

For "Hearst the Collector," David Hundley, an independent designer best known for his work with Gucci, has planned an installation that will fill the first floor of the Art of the Americas Building. The show will begin with a grand, tapestry-lined hall and lead to galleries of decorative arts, sculptures, paintings, antiquities and architectural drawings.

"It was David's idea to do this exhibition as though Hearst himself today were organizing a completely coherent presentation, rather than trying to simulate what would have been done by Julia Morgan [the architect of Hearst Castle] many years ago," Levkoff says. "The architecture is going to be very clean and sleek. No Styrofoam columns."

But not too clean. "We do include a very interesting forgery, an alabaster statue of St. Barbara, just to relax things a bit," Levkoff says. "I don't want to be accused of whitewashing. Not everything Hearst owned was great. But people lose sight of the fact that he was using some things as decoration. He knew what they were, but they worked for him as decoration.

"One big point of the show is to demonstrate that Hearst was not buying in a haphazard manner, the way a magpie collects things in the field. He was buying primarily for his six residences." And the collections at three estates in California, two in New York and one in Wales were installed "in a very harmonious, well-ordered professional way," she says. "When a collection really mattered to him, like the Greek vases, he was very protective and aggressive about what he was buying. There is no doubt that he knew what he was doing. But he was also working within the level of expertise at the time."

Breadth tough to gauge