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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).