Grunwald Center Branches Out

Ruth Asawa, Desert Plant, 1965. Grunwald Center, UCLA, gift of the UCLA Art Council. (c) 2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc.

UCLA is celebrating a significant anniversary of its prints and drawings collection with "Five Centuries of Works on Paper: The Grunwald Center at 70." It's a two-part exhibition of which the first installment, now on view at the Hammer, is an all-star line-up of nearly 100 works on paper by the likes of Mantegna, Dürer, Rembrandt, Goya, and Hiroshige; José Guadalupe Posada, Norman Lewis, Corita Kent, Toba Khedoori, and Analia Saban.

Fred Grunwald (1898–1964) was a German-Jewish collector who fled the Nazi regime with his family in 1939. He rebuilt his livelihood (a shirt business) in New York and then Los Angeles, where he resumed collecting prints. Grunwald's interests started with Käthe Kollwitz and branched out to include other German Expressionists; French lithographs and Old Masters; the Japanese Ukiyo-e tradition; the print revival of 20th-century America. 

Grunwald considered donating his 2000-piece collection to the Los Angeles County Museum. By one story the curators snubbed him; by another, a drunken host made an offensive remark at a donor gathering. Grunwald found a warmer welcome at UCLA. In 1956 he promised his collection to the university, establishing what is now known as the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts. The Center grew along with the reputation of UCLA's art school, but its works were displayed only sporadically until the 2022 opening of the Hammer Museum's works on paper gallery.

Today's Grunwald Center is a true collection of collections, with 45,000 works from diverse donors. Focused on prints, it includes 2500 drawings, a similar number of photographs, and artist's books. The city's ascendance as a center of printmaking is extensively represented.

Installation view

Andrea Mantegna, Bacchanal with Silenus, about 1475-80

The UCLA community built on Grunwald's founding gift by purchasing several marquee Renaissance prints in the 1960s. On view are Mantegna's Bacchanal, Dürer's Melancolia I, and Ghisi's Allegory of Life.

Jacques Callot, La grande chasse (The great hunt), 1619

Like Grunwald, Walter Otto Schneider was a German emigre. He bequeathed about 150 Callot prints in 1962, part of an 800-sheet gift that brought numerous European and American works into the collection. 

Claude Mellan, Saint John the Baptist in the Desert, 1629

Claude Mellan's Saint John the Baptist was purchased last year (with funds from Helga K. and Walter Oppenheimer) and is being shown for the first time. The artist is best known for his Sudarium of Saint Veronica, the engraving of Jesus' head consisting of a single, spiraling line. Saint John the Baptist proves that Mellan was no one-hit wonder. 

Rembrandt, Cottage and Boundary Post on the Spaarndammerdijk, about 1650 

Los Angeles architect Rudolf L. Baumfeld donated a collection of 850 landscape prints and drawings in 1988. The gift included examples of Rembrandt's landscape etchings.

William Hogarth, The Five Orders of Perriwigs, 1761

British satire is represented with sets of prints by Hogarth and the Cruikshank family. The Five Order of Perriwigs was a gift of Robert Mills.

Eugène Grasset, Vitrioleuse (The Acid Thrower), 1894

Lasr year saw Elizabeth Dean's bequest of a thousand-some fin-de-siècle prints, books, and ephemera (featured  in a 2014 Hammer show). Ripped from tabloid headlines, Eugène Grasset's Vitrioleuse is a wronged woman about to toss acid at a rival's face. The sloshing vitriol is a Hokusai Great Wave in miniature.

José Guadalupe Posada, Aquí está la calavera del editor-popular A. Vanegas Arroyo (Here is the skull of the popular publisher A. Vanegas Arroyo), 1907

José Guadalupe Posada's vision of late capitalism involved late capitalists. UCLA Spanish professor Stanley L. Robe assembled a collection of Posada's satirical broadsides and gave it to the university upon his retirement in 1985.

Käthe Kollwitz, Das Volk (The People), 1922

Kollwitz's The People was part of Fred Grunwald's collection, donated by the family the year after the collector's death.

Natori Shunsen, The Actor Ichimura Uzaemon XV as Naozamurai, 1925

Grunwald donated about 50 Japanese prints, and UCLA bought many more from the collection of Frank Lloyd Wright. Natori Shunsen's The Actor Ichimura Uzaemon XV was a gift of Helen and Felix Juda, who also helped build LACMA's Japanese print collection.

Grant Wood, March, 1939

Modest-sized prints by famous American painters were once popularly priced. The Grant Wood is a lithograph from an edition of 250, donated by Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Talpis (son-in-law and daughter of Fred Grunwald). The Paul Cadmus, an etching from an edition of 75, was from Walter Otto Schneider.

Paul Cadmus, Two Boys on a Beach I, 1938

Corita Kent, That Man loves, 1967

60s media hailed Warhol as the Pope of Pop Art and Corita Kent as the Pop Art Nun. Kent really was a nun, though she left the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary after her politically edged art rankled Church hierarchy. She donated over 1400 of her prints and preparatory works to the Grunwald.

Vera Molnár, untitled, 1969

Vera Molnár's computer plotter drawings have become prized as mandalas of the AI juggernaut. This example is part of a collection of 68 vintage computer artworks donated by Patrick Frank.

Analia Saban, THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU Have a Nice Day Plastic Bag, 2016

Art and tech continue to co-evolve. Analia Saban's 2016 THANK YOU… is a 3D-printed sculpture-multiple of a creased plastic shopping bag, published by Mixographia, Los Angeles, and printed by Jose Luz Jimenes.

Part 1 of "Five Centuries of Works on Paper" is at the Hammer through May 17, 2026. A second selection will run June 6 to Oct. 25, 2026.