The Pierre Gianadda Foundation in Martigny, Switzerland, is welcoming this summer a major exhibition of some forty works from theHammer Museum at theUniversity of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Scheduled to run from June 20 to Dec. 2, 2025, the exhibition offers a journey that spans the Renaissance to the early 20th century, highlighting masterpieces by European and American artists, most of which come to Europe for the first time. The exhibition From Rembrandt to Van Gogh is curated by Cynthia Burlingham, deputy director, head of collections at the Hammer Museum, and Naoko Takahatake, director and chief conservator of the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts. The selection of works, known as the Armand Hammer Collection, represents an outstanding artistic legacy, with a particular focus on French art of the 19th and early 20th centuries, but also featuring authors such as Rembrandt and Van Gogh. The exhibition takes place within a prestigious museum setting and offers an interpretation of historical, social and economic transformations through Western art. The Hammer Museum, located in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, is a cultural entity founded by the collector and philanthropist Armand Hammer (New York, 1898 - Los Angeles, 1990), whose passion for art resulted in a large and diverse collection, including paintings, sculpture, prints and drawings. His collection was intended to be “an attempt to bring together some representations of the human condition, pleasures and dreams.”
“I feel a deep need to share with others the magnificent spectacle, excitement and joy that these works of art have brought me,” he explained in the past. Armand Hammer, born in New York to a Russian-American family, graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Medicine and Surgery, but his life took a multifaceted direction: in the 1920s, he moved to the Soviet Union to represent a pharmaceutical company and offer medical assistance during an epidemic. There, he noted the severity of the famine and organized a trading scheme to import grain from the United States in exchange for Soviet products. During his long Moscow sojourn, he began collecting artwork to furnish his home, joined by his brother Victor, an expert in art history. Together they founded Hammer Galleries, an art gallery in New York that Victor directed until his death in 1985. Hammer was also an active entrepreneur in various fields, including whiskey distilling and the oil industry. In parallel, he refined his art collection with frequent purchases and sales, turning to galleries in Paris and New York and prestigious auction houses. His intent was to make the collection accessible and itinerant, promoting numerous exhibitions and supporting museums with donations.
The Armand Hammer Collection, a key part of the Hammer Museum opened in 1990, covers a time span of four centuries with a focus on 19th-century French art, flanked by works by great European masters such as Titian, Rembrandt, Chardin, Fragonard and Goya, as well as important American artists. The Hammer Museum building, designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes, has an understated façade but inside is developed as a palace with galleries around a large courtyard, providing an ideal space to enhance the richness and variety of works. Of particular note in the exhibition at the Fondation Gianadda is the Armand Hammer Daumier and His Contemporaries Collection, which includes some 4,000 lithographs and represents one of the largest collections outside France devoted to the celebrated caricaturist and sculptor Daumier. The sixteen bronze sculptures on display, made between 1929 and 1948, constitute an important nucleus illustrating Daumier’s close observation of 19th-century French society, with biting caricatures of politicians of the time.
Prominent among the paintings in the exhibition is Rembrandt’s Juno near a Temple Dedicated to Mercury, an oil on canvas dated between 1662 and 1665, which depicts the Roman goddess in an almost square format, dressed with authority and set against a dark background, a symbol of her royalty and wealth. Van Gogh, a known admirer of Rembrandt, is featured with Lesemeur (The Sower), an 1888 oil painting that takes a subject from Millet. The work shows a sower in action with a dynamic line and landscape set against industrial elements, emphasizing the tension between nature and modernity.
The French collection includes masterpieces by Jean-Siméon Chardin, such as Les attributs de la peinture (1730-1732), a still life that invites silent contemplation, and Eugène Boudin, forerunner of the Impressionists, with Des Voiliers dans le port (1869), a seascape marked by ominous clouds. Camille Corot, founder of the Barbizon School, is represented by a view of Mantes Cathedral, while Gustave Moreau, a noted Symbolist, offers a magical and decorative depiction ofSalomé dansant devant Hérode(Salome dancing before Herod)(1876). Among the Impressionists, the exhibition displays Claude Monet’s Vue sur Bordighera (1884), a luminous landscape of the Ligurian Riviera, and Camille Pissarro’s Boulevard de Montmartre, Mardi Gras (1807), which depicts the energy of the Mardi Gras parade. Edgar Degas is featured with La Loge du théâtre, a portrait of the theater and dancers in motion, in a play of light and shadow that reveals the intimacy of the scenes. Henri Fantin-Latour contributes an 1872 still life, Pivoines dans un vase bleu et blanc, where the rendering of flower textures is rendered with simplicity and precision. Paul Gauguin, an artist often associated with the search for new territory, is represented by Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin (1889), a painting that shows the distance between the artist and a Breton woman, emphasized by a fence and contrasting brushstrokes. The exhibition also includes works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, known for his themes of nightlife and brothels, and the Nabis Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, who is nicknamed the Japanese Nabi because of the influence of Eastern art in his compositions, as in the painting Scène de rue (1902). Finally, a portrait of the famous actress Sarah Bernhardt, painted in 1885 by Belgian painter Alfred Stevens, concludes this extensive artistic journey.
Admission: daily 9 a.m.-6 p.m.
Adults: CHF 20.
Seniors (over 60 years of age): CHF 18.
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| From Rembrandt to Van Gogh: the Armand Hammer Collection on display at the Fondation Gianadda |
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