Hammer Museum

Armand Hammer ran Occidental Petroleum into his nineties and spent much of his fortune buying old and modern masters. In 1990, weeks before he died, he opened this museum in Los Angeles to keep his collection together under his own name, in a striped marble building attached to Occidental's headquarters in Westwood.

The founding collection is small and personal: a Rembrandt, Van Gogh's view of the hospital garden at Saint-Remy where he was a patient, a room of John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt, and one of the largest holdings anywhere of Honore Daumier, the 19th-century caricaturist who mocked French lawyers and kings.

The museum Hammer left has since become something he might not recognize. Run now by the University of California, it made its name on living artists, free admission and the Made in L.A. survey that takes the temperature of the city's studios every two years.