Hearst, off the hill

Hearst's reputation has suffered partly because he favored decorative arts over paintings, which tend to be used as a yardstick for evaluating art collections, Levkoff says. Also, sales of huge portions of his art holdings -- in the late 1930s, when his business empire was on the verge of bankruptcy, and after his death, in 1951 -- have made it difficult to assess his collecting successes and failures.

Born to great wealth in 1863, Hearst was introduced to art in his youth, on trips to Europe with his mother, philanthropist Phoebe Apperson Hearst. He attended Harvard University, where he excelled as business manager of a satirical magazine but did not graduate. In 1887, at the age of 24, he persuaded his father to let him take charge of the San Francisco Examiner, which George Hearst had acquired in 1880. By the 1930s, the younger Hearst had built the largest publishing empire in the country, including the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, 27 other newspapers and 13 magazines. He also owned a movie studio, Cosmopolitan Studios in New York, and set up a joint venture with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Los Angeles.

Levkoff had no intention of pursuing Hearst when she arrived at the museum almost 20 years ago as a curator of European painting and sculpture. "My predecessor told me that half of what came to LACMA from Hearst was junk," she says, "and as for the other half, I could never find out anything else about it because there was no information about the collection."

As Levkoff settled into her job, she encountered Hearst material in storerooms -- "some of it good and some of it less than good, which is to be expected," she says. But then, with a visiting curator from the Louvre, she made her first visit to Hearst Castle and was "completely enchanted."

Back at LACMA, she began to pay more attention to Hearst donations and found "outstanding" pieces, particularly in decorative arts, she says. "The Limoges enamels, the goldsmiths' work were really first rate, as good as those in any great museum in Europe." Little by little, she found records of the collection too -- some at Hearst Castle, others tucked away in the registrar's office at LACMA and in libraries of other museums.

Levkoff learned that Hearst had donated or provided funds for the purchase of about 900 objects at LACMA, largely through a friendship with William Valentiner, consulting director for the Wilshire Boulevard institution's predecessor, the art division of the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science and Art in Exposition Park.