The Hammer Museum `feels like one man`s collecting fantasy.`
-Thelma Holo of the University of Southern California.
During the last years of his life, Armand Hammer, the billionaire industrialist, sang his own praises in four authorized biographies, a glossy coffee-table picture book devoted to his colorful career, and countless reels of film documenting his globe-trotting exploits.
He created other memorials, too: the Armand Hammer Foundation, the Armand Hammer Cancer Research Laboratory, the Armand Hammer Center for Advanced Studies in Nuclear Energy and Health, and the Armand Hammer United World College.
But the oil magnate, self-styled diplomat, philanthropist and art patron wanted one more thing by which to be remembered. This time, he announced, he would erect in Los Angeles a museum to house his extensive art collection.
It would be a grand structure: a 79,000-square-foot, two-story affair clad in white Carrera marble. The name, Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Culture, would be carved in black letters across the top of the sleek, gray-striped building.
But by the time it opened Nov. 28 on a site behind his Occidental Petroleum headquarters in trendy Westwood Village, the museum, which Hammer once likened to a modern-day Florentine palace, had become the center of a controversy as tangled as the plot of any Renaissance tragedy.
Hammer was not around to see the controversy unfold, dying at age 92 just two weeks after the grand opening of what he regarded as his greatest legacy. In his rush to immortality, Hammer left behind an estate that quickly became embroiled in a dizzying array of lawsuits by feuding relatives and angry investors in his oil company.
He also left behind an idiosyncratic art collection viewed by many critics as mediocre at best, and no money with which to acquire new works or to finish the building`s library and 250-seat auditorium. It`s endowment of $36 million is not large by big-league standards. It is dwarfed, for example, by the $3.4 billion available to the managers of the nearby Getty Museum.
The Hammer collection includes more than 100 paintings and works on paper by European and American artists from the 16th to 20th Centuries; 10,000 sculptures, lithographs and paintings by Honore Daumier, the 19th Century French satirist; and a manuscript by Leonardo da Vinci featuring 360 illustrations of his scientific theories.
”Money is a concern,” says Stephen Garrett, the museum`s director. ”We don`t know yet what the future holds for us.”
Loss of confidence
For most of the 1970s and early 1980s, Hammer`s private collection seemed destined to end up at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where he`d been a trustee since 1968.
For nearly two decades the county museum had built its collection assuming it would inherit Hammer`s master paintings, including works by Van Gogh, Gaugin, Monet, Cezanne, Rembrandt and Rubens, as well as his Daumiers and the only Da Vinci manuscript in the Western Hemisphere.
But in January 1988 Hammer abruptly announced he had changed his mind.
In a 39-page message to the management of the county art museum, Hammer demanded that items in his collection not be mixed with other works, that they be exhibited on an entire floor in his name, and that a full-length portrait of him be displayed at the entrance. He also insisted on the right to hire and fire curators, and he asked for a guarantee that none of his paintings would be sold.
The managers of the county museum, who had already committed the floor space in question to the display of gifts from other donors, responded to Hammer in an exceedingly polite letter; they explained why they could not meet his demands.
”They gave me an ultimatum,” Hammer declared. ”Imagine it!”
”I lost confidence in them,” he added later. ”If this could happen while I was alive, what could happen when I was gone?”
The sudden announcement that he would build his own museum stunned the Los Angeles art establishment and led to an avalanche of negative press.
Trustees of the county museum, who had chosen not to purchase paintings by major artists represented in Hammer`s collection, were outraged when they realized acquisition of such works now would be far too costly.
Meanwhile, stockholders at Occidental Petroleum, which Hammer had salvaged in the mid-`50s and turned into one of America`s largest industrial concerns, sued the company`s management for spending $60 million of corporate funds on a building they viewed as little more than a monument to its long-time chairman. They also challenged Occidental`s decision to allow the museum to operate rent-free on company property for 30 years.
Hammer`s relatives also plunged into the fray. A niece of his third and last wife, Frances, sued for ownership of the collection, valued at $450 million. She charged that Frances, who died in 1989, had been deprived of her fair share of a fortune she helped create.
Court documents in that suit allege that Hammer engaged in a longstanding sexual relationship with Hilary Gibson, the museum`s chief financial officer. Hammer had met Gibson in the early `70s when, as a magazine writer, she interviewed him for a travel story.
Hammer called the suit ”outrageous,” declaring it ”an affront to the long and loving relationship I had with my wife.”
Meanwhile, Hammer`s son, Julian, filed a suit to block the appointment of his own son, Michael, as executor of Hammer`s estate. Michael, 35, who was raised in the oil business by his grandfather and who has no background in art, has been named in Hammer`s will to take the reins of the museum. Julian`s suit is expected to be heard later this month in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
Monument to vanity?
This is more or less where the Byzantine plot stood in November when the tinkling sounds of a baby grand piano and flutes of champagne greeted the rich and famous guests at the museum`s opening. Showcased that evening was a touring exhibition of works by avante-garde Russian painter Kazimir Malevich. While critics praised the show, which drew 30,000 viewers before it closed Jan. 13, some called it a clever diversion from the museum`s flimsy permanent collection.
They charged that while Hammer had acquired a handful of important paintings by major artists, his collection was more accurately characterized by dozens of Victorian-era potboilers, lifeless still lifes and dull, dreamy pastorals.
The museum, wrote Time magazine critic Robert Hughes, 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.”
Popular works
Garrett, the museum`s director, says that while the works may not meet the high standards of connoisseurs, they are popular with the average visitor. ”The works are predominantly attractive and beautiful,” argues Garrett, a British architect who was a consultant to billionaire J. Paul Getty during construction of the Getty Museum in Malibu. ”They`re not political or highly emotional. They are a sort of cabinet collection. The kind of collection someone would have in his house. As a result, it is popular.”
”When you`re dealing with an art museum, the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts,” says Thelma Holo, director of the University of Southern California`s museum studies program. ”There`s no question but that the Hammer collection would have been enhanced by being a part of the county museum.
”Still, there is a place in American society for eccentric museums,”
adds Holo, who was curator of acquisitions for the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. ”They can evolve. At the present time, (the Hammer Museum) feels like one man`s collecting fantasy.”
Born on New York`s Lower East Side to Russian Jewish immigrants, Hammer, who became a millionaire before graduating from college, established invaluable personal ties to generations of Kremlin leaders as a free-wheeling Western capitalist. Through a staggering variety of enterprises, Hammer expanded his influence within governments throughout the world, becoming one of the most important private citizens of the century.
A start in art
In the 1920s, Hammer entered the art business his brother, Victor. They acquired a mound of priceless religious vestments from the royal chapels of Leningrad, cut them up, and sold them back home as piano throws and table covers. The two turned an enormous profit, and the business soon blossomed into the Hammer Galleries.
When the galleries failed in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash, the brothers developed another art scheme.
They filled a freighter with furniture and artifacts bought in Russian flea markets and hotel lobbies and made the rounds of American department stores, displaying what they advertised to thousands of prospective buyers as the ”Romanov Treasure,” suggesting that many of the items had come from the households of the czar`s family.
In Chicago, the display of this merchandise at Marshall Field and Co. was a huge hit, its scheduled three-week stint turning into a three-year stay.
In the midst of the Depression, Hammer made millions selling these items and other artifacts. In the process, he became hooked on art. Next he would turn his energies to the more expensive task of assembling a major private collection.
War with the critics
”It`s a hunt,” Hammer once said. ”I get a certain joy out of finding rare works, out of learning the stories attached to them.
”I`ve always liked to collect,” he added. ”But pictures are something more than just collecting. You are connecting yourself with something that really is immortal, something that has survived all these centuries. You are preserving something for posterity.”
As head of Occidental, Hammer put his collection on tour to help grease business deals and to open doors. But he also brought art to people who had seen little, if any, of it before.
For example, when he took a portion of his private collection to a small Georgia county of 20,000, the show drew 15,000, a few coming from as far away as 150 miles. Some signed their names in the guest book with an ”X.”
”Not only did he amass a collection at a time when almost all the great works of art were bought out,” says Steve Weinberg, whom Hammer sued for his unauthorized biography, ”he showed it in a way that nobody showed art before. . . . A lot of the criticism of his collection is very elitist and doesn`t reflect the people`s taste.”
Hammer`s war with the critics came to a head during a 1970 exhibition of his collection at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
Washington Post critic Paul Richard`s scathing review, headlined ”An Exhibition of Losers by Major Masters,” even hinted at forgeries. Hammer defended his collection picture by picture in a dull, lengthy response that appeared in the Post.
He then hired John Walker, retired director of the National Gallery of Art, and embarked on perhaps the most expensive buying spree of recent times. ”I have known very few collectors as willing to recognize mistakes,”
wrote Walker in his book ”Self-Portrait With Donors.”
”He had been a colossal bargain hunter. There is no better way to be an unsuccessful collector.”
Work to be done
Hammer bought an enormous number of Daumier lithograhs, Rembrandt`s
”Juno,” and a spattering of works by major painters. His prize was the Da Vinci manuscript, for which he paid $5.12 milion in 1980. He promptly changed its name from the Codex Leicester to the Codex Hammer.
It is the centerpiece of the Hammer Museum, a religious-like artifact displayed in a dark, windowless room, the brown pages bathed in an eerie glow. But the Da Vinci and a handful of important paintings are not enough, critics say, to make the museum a success.
”The question is what kind of exhibition program they`ll develop and maintain,” says Henry Hopkins, former director of the San Francisco Museum of Art and a visiting professor at UCLA. ”That`s crucial to the future of the museum. It`s not the kind of collection you come to see over and over.”
An exhibition of lithographs by the early 20th Century American artist George Bellows is scheduled to open soon, but director Garrett recognizes the success of the Malevich exhibition will be hard to duplicate.
While Garrett says exhibitions might range from advertising and motion-picture graphics to bicycles and surfboards, for now, nothing is certain.
”The exhibits are not exactly in place,” Garrett says. ”The auditorium is expensive to complete, but it`s critical that we get it done.
”One would prefer for all the publicity to be favorable,” he adds.
”That may happen in the long run.
