America's Vainest Museum

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.