Eli and Edythe Broad have been regular visitors to Art Basel along with the founding director of the Broad, Joanne Heyler. But this year the collectors are giving the fair a miss: opening the Broad on 20 September, a $140m, 120,000 sq. ft museum on Los Angeles’s Grand Avenue, has had to take priority.
Heyler is busy overseeing the installation of the inaugural hang in the Diller Scofidio + Renfro-designed space, which will feature works from the Broad’s own collection and that of the Broad Art Foundation, which they established in 1984. Heyler recently told the Wall Street Journal that the foundation is collecting at the rate of around a work a week. We can report that recent acquisitions include Robert Longo’s diptych, Untitled (Ferguson Police, August 13, 2014) (2014), which she first saw on Petzel Gallery’s (M14) stand at Art Basel in Miami in December. “The Broads have collected politically charged works since they began collecting in the 1980s,” she says. “[The work] was a major stand for [Longo] to take and a little bit of a new departure.”
The Broad Art Foundation’s most recent acquisition is Julie Mehretu’s Invisible Sun (algorithm 8, fable form) (2015), which can be seen at Marian Goodman Gallery at Art Basel (B16). But the biggest work recently acquired, which is now the largest painting in the collection, is Takashi Murakami’s In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow (2014). Measuring 82 ft-long, the painting is the Japanese artist’s response to the country’s history of natural disasters.
Accommodating this and other oversized work will not present a big problem at the Broad as the architects have designed a 35,000 sq. ft, column-free gallery, with 23-foot high ceilings. The architect Elizabeth Diller has described the experience of arriving in the top floor space, which has more than 300 distinctively shaped skylights to filter the southern Californian sunshine, as a “sublime” experience. Beneath is a space called the vault, which will house the foundation’s collection. Windows will allow glimpses of the stored works, which will be shown in future hangs along with loans from other collections.
While many works in the Broad Art Foundation collection are well known thanks to its numerous loans—it has long operated as a “lending library”—the breadth and depth of the collection will only be fully appreciated when the museum, which will have free entry, opens. The Broads have collected around 200 artists in depth, including Jeff Koons, Joseph Beuys, John Baldessari and Mike Kelley. It has the largest collection of works by Roy Lichtenstein outside of the artist’s foundation and more works by Cindy Sherman than any other institution or individual.
Inaugural hang
Heyler says that building a public home for the collection has “intensified and amplified” the foundation’s collecting, but acquiring a work a week has been known in the past. The Wall Street Journal speculated whether a work by the Los Angeles-based artist Mark Bradford would be in the inaugural hang. Heyler can’t say which of the eight in the collection would be included, but confirms that the artist will be represented. The museum has announced that on show will be the immersive installation, The Visitors (2012), by Ragnar Kjartansson as well as works by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Barbara Kruger and, of course, Jeff Koons and Cindy Sherman, among others.