Image: Julie Mehretu, Entropia (review), 2004
The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles is in the final weeks of "Five Centuries of Works on Paper: The Grunwald Center at 70, Part II", on view since 7 June and closing on 25 October 2026. The exhibition is the second instalment of the museum's celebration of the 70th anniversary of the UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, following a first part that ran from December 2025 to May 2026.
The Grunwald Center was founded in 1956 with a gift of prints from the Los Angeles collector Fred Grunwald. Through donations and acquisitions it has grown into one of the country's leading collections of works on paper, now numbering more than 45,000 prints, drawings, photographs and artists' books from the Renaissance to the present. It has been housed at the Hammer since 1994, where its holdings appear regularly in exhibitions and can be consulted in a dedicated study room.
Part II brings together more than 70 works chosen to reflect the range of the collection. Old master prints by Albrecht Dürer, Daniel Hopfer and Giovanni Battista Piranesi sit alongside works by Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Utagawa Hiroshige and Winslow Homer, and by modern artists including Käthe Kollwitz, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Sonia Delaunay. Photography is represented by Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Judy Fiskin, Robert Heinecken, James Welling and Catherine Opie, while more recent artists include Jasper Johns, Helen Frankenthaler, Julie Mehretu, James Turrell, Alison Saar and Kara Walker.
Works illustrated by the museum include Dürer's The Babylonian Whore (around 1498), a sheet from Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (1857), Edvard Munch's On the Waves of Love (1896), an untitled work from Heinecken's Are You Rea (1967) and Mehretu's Entropia (review) (2004). An audio guide with contributions from artists, curators and scholars is available through the Hammer's guide on the Bloomberg Connects app.
The exhibition is organised by Naoko Takahatake, director and chief curator of the Grunwald Center, and Cynthia Burlingham, former deputy director of curatorial affairs, with Jennie Waldow and Kelin Michael of the Grunwald Center.
