Word: hammerism
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...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...
...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...
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...
...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...
...perhaps intensify for days or even weeks, employing craft ranging from Apache helicopters to B-52s and all sizes in between. Once the U.S. and allied forces have won complete control of the skies -- at week's end they were close but not quite there -- they are likely to hammer ever harder at such targets as supply lines and troop concentrations...