Eli Broad's art collection needs a home, so he'll build it

A new headquarters that philanthropist Eli Broad aims to build for his Broad Art Foundation would include a 25,000-square-foot museum for exhibiting his collection, the foundation’s director said Wednesday. That exhibition space would be about half as large as the $56-million Broad Contemporary Art Museum, which opened nine months ago at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

One possible site for Broad's new museum is at the intersection of Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards in Beverly Hills, but foundation director Joanne Heyler said that two other unspecified L.A.-area locations are “under serious consideration.”

“We’re probably going to have a Westside location at the end of the day,” she said.

Among the prominently available sites for museum construction are two parcels that LACMA owns across the street from its sprawling Wilshire Boulevard complex.

Michael Govan, LACMA's director, said Wednesday that "of course we've discussed" a possible Broad Foundation facility on one of those properties — but that "complications" such as the size and shape of the parcels and Broad's time frame for moving ahead could make it difficult to plant the Broad Foundation opposite the Broad Contemporary Art Museum.   

Taking a more-the-merrier stance, Govan said he isn't concerned that a new Broad museum in Beverly Hills or elsewhere could dilute the audience for exhibitions at BCAM. "L.A. is a really big city, bursting with art activity everywhere," he said.

Last month, an attorney for Broad sent a letter to Roderick Wood, the Beverly Hills city manager, to “confirm the continuing interest” of the Broad Foundation in moving there. The letter was the first step to surface publicly in a process that Heyler said will probably take 2½ to three years once a site is chosen.

The Broad Foundation (now based in 1927-vintage headquarters in Santa Monica, left) functions as a “lending library” for its collection of 2,000 works of post-World War II art, sending them to museums around the world that request pieces for exhibitions.

The new headquarters would supply what now is lacking at the foundation’s current building: galleries where visitors could see rotating shows drawn from the collection and a storage component designed not just to warehouse the entire trove but also to double as an easily accessible research facility.

In a new building, curators interested in borrowing art for their museums would have an easier time getting an advance look, Heyler said, and scholars would have a place to hunker down with the art they were studying. Currently, she said, the collection is stored in four scattered L.A. facilities.
Among the artists represented in the collection are Richad Serra, Damien Hirst, Chuck Close, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein and Jeff Koons.

Heyler downplayed the possibility that exhibitions at a Broad building would compete for audiences with BCAM and L.A.’s other showcases for contemporary art: the Museum of Contemporary Art and the UCLA Hammer Museum.

“We’ll be doing something different,” she said, adding that “we are supporters in a major way of all three of those institutions and would want to continue.”

—Mike Boehm

Top photo: Eli Broad in front of Mike Kelley's "Infinite Expansion" at the current Broad Foundation headquarters in Santa Monica.

Bottom photo: The Broad Foundation's 1927 building in Santa Monica, which is too small to house the public exhibitions that Eli Broad has in mind.

Photo credits: Anne Cusack /Los Angeles Times

Comments

[pdoff]

This backstabbing, reneging multi-billionaire, should use a tiny portion of his vast wealth to help prop up MoCA, the museum he helped conceive and initially fund. He's a lifetime trustee! Considering that he spent around $10 million+ bottom-fishing some questionable art at auctions last week, you'd think he could fork over $20 million to help out MoCA for a year (that would pay for an entire year's worth of their operating budget).

If the billionaires and multi-millionaires who sit on MoCA's board don't put up their own money first, they can't possibly expect us middle-class art lovers to bail them out.

[not afraid]

broad is selfish and should give moca a nice big endowment if he wants to do the right thing
$$$$$$$$

and borrow the collection just like everyone else.

[ARMINEH]

I HAVE A HOMELESS PAINTING,WOULD U GIVE HIM A SHELTER?

[John Crandell]

Dear Eli Broad,
all things considered, the east side of Grand Avenue in Downtown has become a disaster. That is if one considers the course of recent events, extending from First to Third streets.
'The Grand' development project by the Related Companies may soon sink beneath the economic waves of deflation. The bifurcated, schizoid layout of
the MOCA campus was ordained to accommodate the development of the adjacent hotel. The original architect of the hotel washed his hands of the project as it neared completion. The massing and fenestration of the museum was once considered a breakthrough; no longer. Some now see these qualities as little more than quaint. Presently we learn that the financial dragon rears it's head.
Is it possible that there could be an imaginative melding of your foundation, your collection and the Museum of Contemporary Art in a new facility opposite Disney Hall? If so, the present site of MOCA could thereafter be sold off for redevelopment. I would jump for joy to hear of such news (and I live nowhere near Los Angeles).
Please, forget Beverly Hills. Forget LACMA. Stick with Grand Avenue!