Highlighting centuries of important drawings, prints, photographs, and other works on paper,
the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts’s anniversary showcases its lasting impact on art scholarship.
The objects illustrated are in the UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.
Gift of the UCLA Art Council, © 2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner.
The Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts marks its seventieth anniversary with Five Centuries of Works on Paper: The Grunwald Center at 70, a two-part exhibition exploring the center’s history and collection. Founded at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1956 and housed at the Hammer Museum since 1994, the center has advanced interdisciplinary learning and discovery through its study room, exhibitions, and public programs, serving students, scholars, artists, and audiences across Los Angeles.
The center originated with a foundational gift of prints from Fred Grunwald, a German Jewish émigréand collector committed to the educational value of direct encounters with art. He envisioned his collection as “a significant contribution to the cultural life of the university community.” For seven decades, successive curators have worked with donors, scholars, and artists to broaden and enrich the center’s collection, which now comprises more than forty-five thousand prints, drawings, photographs, and artists’ books spanning the late fifteenth century to the present.
The center emerged during a period of transformative growth for UCLA and the Los Angeles art scene. As a repository of cultural history as well as a platform for contemporary artistic practice and scholarship, the center has evolved in step with the creative and intellectual development of the university and the broader arts community.
Gift of Alan Stamm, © 2025 The Robert Heinecken Trust, courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.
Five Centuries of Works on Paper traces this progression, highlighting major gifts and acquisitions as well as landmark exhibitions and programs. The first installment, on view until May 17, opens with a selection of works donated by Grunwald and his family, reflecting his initial focus on German expressionism and his interests in Edo-period Japanese woodblock prints, nineteenth-century French lithography, and contemporary printmaking. Further sections showcase areas of sustained strength in the collection: early modern European prints, nineteenth-century European prints in dialogue with Japan, North American prints and photographs of the early to mid-twentieth century, drawings after 1960, and printmaking in Los Angeles after 1960.
The installment features eighty-six works by seventy-nine artists, including Rembrandt van Rijn, Utagawa Hiroshige, Mary Cassatt, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, Edward Hopper, Ruth Asawa, Lee Bontecou, Bridget Riley, Ed Ruscha, and Analia Saban.The anniversary celebration continues with the second part of the exhibition from June 7 through October 25. Fresh selections of works further represent the
scope of the Grunwald family’s gifts and the depth of the collection’s strengths in early modern and nineteenth-century European prints and drawings. Additional sections introduce the center’s commitment to modern European prints and drawings, twentieth-century photography, and American printmaking after 1960 beyond Los Angeles. Featured artists include Albrecht Dürer, Edgar Degas, Käthe Kollwitz, Henri Matisse, Imogen Cunningham, Robert Heinecken, Jasper Johns, Zarina, and Julie Mehretu.
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Fred Grunwald.
Together, the works in both installments illustrate the breadth of creative approaches and technical innovation artists have brought to printmaking, drawing, and photography across different periods and geographies, underscoring the enduring vitality and expressive potential of these mediums. By reflecting on the center’s past, the anniversary exhibition aims to illuminate and inspire possibilities for its future.
