Eli Broad at home: A more colorful view of his collection

For this Sunday's Arts & Books feature, we visit Eli Broad at his hilltop home in Brentwood, not far from the Getty Center.

The standard line is that his wife Edythe (pictured) has a more natural connection to the art that they both collect. As Connie Bruck wrote in a recent New Yorker profile, while Edythe has “a strong feeling” for art, Eli “whips through museums and galleries with little sign of emotion.”

But during the visit Broad took the time to talk about his personal journey as an art collector -- and share some colorful stories too.

Like the time when President Clinton was guest of honor for a fundraising dinner in the Broads' home and recognized a lounging female figure sculpted by George Segal as a woman he used to date in Arkansas. (She later became Norris Church Mailer, Norman Mailer's sixth wife.)

"I'd be bored to death if I spent all my time with other businesspeople, bankers and lawyers," Broad says.

Click here for the full story, with more from Broad on the artists and artworks that have made an impression over the years.

-- Jori Finkel
www.twitter.com/jorifinkel

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Photo: The Broads at home with Jasper Johns' "Flag" from 1967.  Licensed by VAGA, New York. From the Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection, Los Angeles. Credit: Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times.

Comments

[Olden Atwoody]

Nice picture of J. Fred Muggs.

[Donald Frazell]

His junk is lifeless. All about amassing an investment to dump on others for tax breaks from his robber baron career. No, its all old Eli, what feeling?

And of course immortatlity,but a a buffoon and thief of his day. He is no Norton Simon, Rockefeller, Stein or Guggenheim. At least their proceeds of monopoly lasted, his will go the way of Dubai. Dust to dust.