TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/012891/0128400.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.8 KB | 141 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 98

America's Vainest Museum


Armand Hammer's tribute to himself raises a furor

By ROBERT HUGHES


    Medieval France, a cleric boasted, was covered with a "white
mantle" of churches. So is America, with museums. Nobody can
say for sure which museum is the worst. But now we know which
is the vainest. It opened in Los Angeles last November. It is
the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center. It cost
nearly $100 million -- paid for, to their now deep resentment,
by the shareholders of Occidental Petroleum Corp., whose
chairman Dr. Hammer was.

    In life, which he departed in December at the age of 92,
Hammer was a textbook case of furor Americanus: a bullying
blowhard with an ego like a Mack truck, whose main aim was to
parlay a genius for negotiation (which he had) into a Nobel
Peace Prize (which, luckily for the prestige of that award, he
never got). His career as humanitarian and Maecenas was loud,
insubstantial and based on hype, although he did do one good
thing for the National Gallery in Washington by giving it a
major collection of old masters drawings, many bought with the
advice of its own experts.

    As chairman of Occidental -- an ailing oil company he took
over in 1957 and turned into a going concern throughout the
1960s and '70s -- Hammer circulated tirelessly between the U.S.
and the Soviet Union on the corporate jet, arranging "cultural
exchanges" that were more show than tell. Somehow one could not
forget, when viewing the eclectic arrays he promoted as
"treasures of the Soviet Union," how in the '30s he and his
brother Victor had astutely brought a freighter load of
furniture and bibelots from Russian flea markets and hotel
lobbies and sold it as "the Romanov treasure."

    But the illusion worked for a while. It gave the impression
that there was no trade agreement or easing of the cold war for
which he was not, in some way, responsible. And to make sure
that none of his dealings with bigwigs remained unrecorded,
Hammer, or rather, his company, Oxy, maintained a film company,
Hammer Productions, whose partial purpose was to film and tape
the Flying Doctor wherever he went. Alas, the team could not
follow him to his last destination. One would give much for a
videotape of Hammer attempting to glad-hand St. Peter or
seizing the elbow of Beelzebub, as he had so often grabbed
Ronald Reagan's in the hope of a presidential pardon for
Hammer's conviction for making illegal contributions to Richard
Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign.

    Nowhere was Hammer's rage for fame more obtrusive than in
his role as a collector of old masters and Impressionists,
which he flew around the world as promotion for Oxy and
himself. Hammer's proudest feat was his 1980 purchase, for
$5.12 million (a big price then), of a  manuscript by Leonardo
da Vinci called the Codex Leicester, which he renamed the Codex
Hammer. It consists of 36 pages of notes on water movement.
There is not a single drawing of aesthetic interest among the
meager diagrams in the margins.

    Hammer wooed, and was wooed by, the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, which made him a trustee in the hope of getting
his collection. And indeed, some of it (though not much) was
worth having. Hammer had one museum-quality Van Gogh, a
writhing, energetic view of the madhouse garden at St.-Remy,
along with fine to fair works by Sargent, Eakins, Gustave
Moreau and Chardin. When LACMA was offered, by collector George
Longstreet, a collection of good works by Honore Daumier, the
great French social satirist, Hammer insisted on buying them
all pre-emptively, on the promise that he would give them to the
museum. LACMA believed this.

    For 17 years, Hammer continued to announce -- in interviews,
in print and in letters to the museum's board of trustees --
that LACMA would inherit his whole collection. It got nothing.
For as Hammer's belief in his genius as a collector swelled
over the years, so did his demands, which became so
unreasonable that LACMA rejected them. Hammer rewrote his will,
picked up his marbles, Daumier and all, and walked. Now, Hammer
announced, he would make his gift to the world in the form of
his own museum.

    The building -- a striped marble lump by Edward Larrabee
Barnes, which looks like a consulate in some Middle Eastern
emirate -- cost $60 million; the endowment fund is $38 million,
a large but, for its purposes, insufficient amount. It is a
tribute to his gall that Hammer managed to get Oxy to pay out
such sums, when he owned less than 1% of Oxy stock, on the
questionable ground that the museum would pump up the company's
prestige. Oxy shareholders are suing for waste of corporate
assets. The niece of Hammer's wife Frances, who died in 1989,
is also suing on the ground that the collection, having been
jointly acquired with her aunt's money, should have been half
hers and does not belong to the museum at all.

    Before his death, Hammer claimed the collection was worth
$450 million,  but most of it is junk: a mishmash of second- or
third-rate work by famous names. The Rembrandt Juno is one of
his weakest paintings -- large, flat and gross. The Rubens
Adoration of the Shepherds may not be by Rubens at all; the
Titian, not by Titian. The Leonardo pages, installed in a sort
of dim mortuary chapel of their own, look ridiculously
anticlimactic. The Impressionist work is as dull as could be.
And, except for the Van Gogh and one early Gauguin, so is the
more modern material. Only the Daumier holdings have any depth.
One is left with the impression that Hammer had no eye at all,
no feeling for art; that he bought like a bad shot firing into
the middle of a flock of birds and, except for a few chance
pellets, missing them all. Perhaps what he really liked was
sentimental kitsch (of which he bought a great deal).

    What will happen to this curious institution? Until the
lawsuits finish, it is hard to say. When one thinks of the
financial problems that beset the few really great small
museums founded on a single person's taste -- the Frick in New
York City or the Phillips Collection in Washington -- the idea
of wasting $98 million on this trivial package seems obscene.
The Hammer Museum cannot evolve into a serious collection. It
would have difficulty making a mark as a site of temporary
shows, since there is too much competition from other Los
Angeles museums. Perhaps, as one critic suggested, the place
could be converted into the Armand Hammer Memorial Multiplex
Cinema. Or perhaps it should be left as it is, a warning to
egotistical collectors who think they can achieve immortality
by setting up their own museums. A monument, in short, to the
vanity of vanity.