Cassatt Before the Gavel, Armand Hammer’s Private Collection Previews at Sotheby’s Los Angeles
A dozen paintings once owned by the Hammer Museum’s founder spent three days in Los Angeles before heading to New York.
For three days last week, Los Angeles got a private look at the walls of Armand Hammer. A dozen paintings from the oil tycoon’s own collection went on view at Sotheby’s Los Angeles from September 23 through 25, a last stop in the city before the works head to New York for Sotheby’s marquee auctions in November.
The 12 works carry a combined estimate of $25 million to $37 million. ARTnews reported that the top lot is expected to be Edgar Degas’s Trois danseuses (Jupes jaunes), painted around 1899 and estimated at $10 million to $15 million. Mary Cassatt’s Summertime, Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Antibes and Camille Pissarro’s Paysage à Osny, vue de la ferme round out the highlights.
Summertime has the best story. When Hammer bought it in 1971, the $150,000 sale set a world record for Cassatt and for any female artist at the time, the Los Angeles Times reported. According to the Times, Sotheby’s expects the painting to break $10 million and set a new auction record for the artist. “Collectors genuinely see it as an opportunity,” said Julian Dawes, Sotheby’s head of impressionist and modern art.
Angelenos know the name from the Hammer Museum in Westwood. Hammer moved to Los Angeles in 1956 at 58, planning to retire, and instead put $50,000 into two wildcat oil wells owned by a nearly bankrupt Occidental Petroleum. His last public appearance was at the party celebrating the museum’s opening in 1990.
“Armand Hammer’s imprint on Los Angeles is difficult to overstate,” Jacqueline Wachter, head of Sotheby’s Los Angeles office, said in a release. “He believed that collecting art came with an obligation to share it, a conviction that shaped not only his own museum but decades of gifts to institutions across this city and beyond. Long before Los Angeles was recognized as a global capital for art, Hammer was already insisting that world-class painting belonged here.”
Proceeds will go to the Armand Hammer Foundation, which is shifting its focus from caring for the collection to giving grants for arts education and institutions. “This is especially important at this time when there are cutbacks in arts funding,” foundation chairman Viktor Hammer, the collector’s great-grandson, wrote in an email, according to the Times.
