Bringing together nearly forty major works from the prestigious Hammer Museum (UCLA, Los Angeles), this exhibition at the Fondation Pierre Gianadda (Martigny, Switzerland) offers a luminous journey through Western painting, from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century. From Rembrandt to Van Gogh, from Fragonard to Monet, European masters stand alongside American artists, revealing a fascinating part of transatlantic art history.

At the heart of this exhibition, we discover the story of a unique collection: that built by Armand Hammer (1898-1990), a visionary industrialist, passionate patron, and erudite collector. Far from being a mere accumulation of rare objects, this collection developed as an aesthetic odyssey, guided by a quest for harmony, transmission, and intelligibility of the world through art.

A Great Collector

A doctor by training, an audacious businessman, Hammer embarked on an extraordinary trajectory from the 1920s, marked by a long stay in the Soviet Union. Initially tasked with a humanitarian mission in the Urals, he developed an unprecedented commercial activity there while discovering a nascent passion for decorative arts. In a Moscow palace with empty walls, the need to furnish, adorn, and collect became imperative. This foundational experience initiated a quest for beauty and meaning that would continue to unfold throughout his life. With the help of his brother Victor, an art historian trained at Princeton, he first acquired French furniture, Sèvres porcelains, Fabergé jewelry, then turned towards painting. In 1928, the two brothers took over a New York gallery, giving birth to the famous Hammer Galleries. The collector then also became a patron, exhibiting his works around the world and making major donations to museums.

The Hammer Museum: The Institution of a Vision

This ambition culminated in 1990, with the inauguration in Los Angeles of the Hammer Museum, designed by architect Edward Larrabee Barnes. The building, with its Renaissance palace appearance, houses two major poles: the Armand Hammer Collection, bringing together European works from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, and the Daumier and Contemporaries Collection, dedicated to one of the greatest French satirists.

The proposed journey embraces the major schools of European painting, with a predilection for the French nineteenth century: Chardin, Fragonard, Monet, Degas, Renoir, Vuillard… All figures whose works reflect a sensitive view of reality, oscillating between tradition and modernity. The collection is distinguished by its stylistic coherence and expressive richness, articulating old masterpieces and modern flashes in the same humanist impulse.