Under the Hammer

In 1921 Armand Hammer went to Russia and, realizing that there is almost nothing a bureaucracy needs so much as pencils, began to manufacture them for the newly established Soviet Government. He made such good pencils that grateful Bolsheviks sent him back to the U.S. to unload their greatest white elephant, the Imperial Russian crown jewels and objets d'art. He unloaded them so successfully that when the world's only other comparable white elephant, the Hearst art and antique collection, was put up for sale in 1941, Armand Hammer was called in to do the selling.

Promptly he packed the fifth floor of Manhattan's Gimbel Bros, department store with two and a half acres of medieval armor, Hispano-Moresque pottery, Dutch masters, and other art objects too numerous to mention. By last month the total sales of these and other Hammer enterprises were near $15 million.

Last week Salesman Hammer reported that he was all but swamped by a new buying wave. War contractors, he said, their wallets abulge with flat money they could not spend on Lincolns or Frigidaires, were investing heavily in the Hearst and other treasures. Most sales were in the $75 to $100 bracket. Most purchases were of antique firearms and vast oil paintings in outsize gold frames. But there was brisk trading in the Hearst antique paneled rooms (complete with fireplaces and window casements) at $598 to $19,049. And Mr. Hammer had hustled down to Gimbels' groaning floor, and confidently expected eager buyers to snap up a Louis XII carved walnut dresser ($269), a pair of carved 17th-Century Italian stone urns ($598), a suit of 16th-Century Pisan armor ($2,397), Van Dyck's portrait of England's Queen Henrietta Maria ($79,000).

Much of this bullish buying, Mr. Hammer said, was local. A Fielding Lewis desk ($149) was advertised in Manhattan Sunday papers. Monday morning there were 40 purchasers waiting cash in hand. But there were also twelve checks in the mail and 18 telegrams ordering Gimbels to hold the piece. And there were other signs that the art-buying wave was sweeping the U.S. Purchasers in St. Louis, Detroit and many another inland city have taken to mailing carte blanche orders, asking Salesman Hammer to buy for them sight unseen. One grateful woman art lover thanked Mr. Hammer for realizing her lifelong dream--of owning "a hand-painted oil painting."

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