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.