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THE NEW YORKER
The Art World September 28, 2015 Issue
Going Downtown
Eli Broad opens his own museum in Los Angeles.
By Peter Schjeldahl
Works by Jeff Koons and Christopher Wool on the third floor, where the lighting—natural and artificial—adjusts automatically. Credit Courtesy Bruce Damonte / The Broad / Diller Scofidio + Renfro
The Broad, it’s called: a snazzy new museum of excellent contemporary art, which just opened in downtown Los Angeles, right across the street from the Museum of Contemporary Art. If that sounds redundant, consider that, a few miles away, on Wilshire Boulevard, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art also features a contemporary collection, as does, a bit farther west, the Hammer Museum. Besides being no more than fifty years old, all these institutions—along with the wondrous Walt Disney Concert Hall, designed by Frank Gehry, which stands next door to the Broad—have in common histories of the patronage and the aggressive, sometimes resented, influence of the billionaire philanthropist and collector Eli Broad.
Few individuals whose surnames aren’t Medici have had such dramatic effect on the art culture of an important city. The new museum crowns a particular passion of Broad’s: to create a cultural center for Los Angeles along a stretch of Grand Avenue, which also boasts the Music Center—home to the Disney hall and three other venues—and the High School for the Visual and Performing Arts. The words “Los Angeles” and “center” consort oddly, especially since the city’s ever more apocalyptic traffic further dulls the local citizens’ never ardent yen to venture out of their usual ways. Nor does Grand Avenue feel like anybody’s idea of an agora. There are busy Latino and Asian neighborhoods nearby, but, after hours, you don’t encounter many people in the spottily gentrified downtown area (and a considerable number of those you do are homeless). At any time on the avenue, even cars are relatively sparse. Yet the dream of culture-craving throngs persists. The Broad offers free admission. Synergistically, moca has eased tense relations with its chief patron to grant free yearlong memberships to all who visit the Broad during the first two weeks. (Broad bailed out the foundering institution in 2008, but the director he selected departed under a cloud of acrimony, two years ago.)
The museum is well worth a visit now and periodic revisits later, as its exhibits cycle through a collection of some two thousand works by about two hundred artists. Around two hundred and fifty pieces are currently on display. Whomever Broad and his wife, Edythe, collect, they collect in depth. The show’s roughly chronological arrangement incorporates several rooms devoted to single artists, like pocket retrospectives. The building, by the New York firm of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, plays changes on a theme that the architects call “the veil and the vault”—masking what amounts to a storage facility for the collection. The façade is a slewed honeycomb of concrete modules: slitlike holes set in diagonal channels, which suggest the tidy claw marks of a very large cat. The building’s capacity to impress is muted by the material Ninth Symphony of the Gehry concert hall, but it’s pleasant enough.
You enter through a dim lobby with dark-gray, Surrealistically curved walls and ceiling. The lobby leads to shapely ground-floor galleries and offers the choice of a cylindrical glass elevator or a hundred-and-five-foot escalator—low-impact thrill rides—to the vast, columnless third floor, which is beautifully illuminated by automatically adjusted blends of natural and artificial light. The interior walls stop short of the skylight-riddled ceiling, conveying a temporary and flexible character. The vault portion of the building occupies the second floor. You catch sight of it through glass walls when you descend a hushed, snaking, umbilical-like stairwell: a cavernous space of racks and equipment, yielding glimpses of art works at rest between shows. It’s a nice touch, like a backstage pass at the opera.
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The third floor of the Broad.
Courtesy Iwan Baan / The Broad / Diller Scofidio + Renfro
Broad, now eighty-two, and Edythe arrived in L.A. in 1963, from their home town of Detroit. The son of a union organizer who came to own dime stores, Broad started a home-building firm that ascended to the Fortune 500, as did a subsequent startup in financial services. (A how-to-succeed memoir, published in 2012, shares his secret in its title, “The Art of Being Unreasonable.” His friend Michael Bloomberg wrote the introduction.) Edythe introduced him to art, hesitantly. She wanted an Andy Warhol soup-can print, but worried that her husband would be appalled by the price: a hundred dollars. (They later parted with $11.7 million for a soup-can painting.) In 1972, they bought a van Gogh drawing, but Broad tired of it and arranged a swap for a rugged early painting by Robert Rauschenberg. The couple’s taste gravitated to Pop art—they own thirty-four works by Roy Lichtenstein—and to socially conscious, left-liberal sensibilities. (“I’m not as liberal as I used to be,” Broad told me, when I spoke with him at the museum, but he remains a Democrat.) He is rare among collectors in possessing abundant terrific works by the late Leon Golub, a painter of white-mercenary criminality in developing-world locales. The museum’s inaugural show presents a large charcoal drawing, by Robert Longo, from a photograph taken last year in Ferguson, Missouri, in which police advance, at night, in a fog of tear gas.
Once committed to collecting, the Broads anchored their holdings with canonical works by Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, and Ellsworth Kelly. Twombly and Kelly aside—and excepting a more recent fondness for Albert Oehlen and Mark Grotjahn—they shied from abstraction, and skated lightly over Conceptualist art of the nineteen-seventies. In the eighties, the Broads went in big for neo-expressionist and Pictures Generation artists, notably Jean-Michel Basquiat and Cindy Sherman. (They own a hundred and twenty-four pictures by Sherman.) The German artists Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz, and Thomas Struth are also strongly represented, and recent New York stars in the collection include Christopher Wool, John Currin, Glenn Ligon, and Kara Walker. But, with the prominent exceptions of Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Mike Kelley, Chris Burden, Charles Ray, Robert Therrien, and Lari Pittman, the Broads have braved local exasperation by not going out of their way to boost L.A. artists.
There’s not much installation art on view, but there is one gem: “The Visitors” (2012), by the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson. The piece consists of nine gorgeous, hour-long video projections, placed at odd angles in a dark room, of as many musicians, sitting in separate rooms in a dilapidated mansion, and noodling with a love song. The exquisiteness of sight and sound and the pathos of the musicians’ shared loneliness brought tears to my eyes when I first saw the piece, at the Luhring Augustine Gallery, two years ago. Would that happen again, during a note-taking tour of a jam-packed museum? It did.
Broad’s favorite contemporary artist seems to be Jeff Koons, whose works he owns in profusion—from encased vacuum cleaners, floating basketballs, and a stainless-steel inflated bunny to a huge, color-tinted, stainless-steel rendering of tulips and the inevitable balloon dog. Broad came to Koons’s rescue in the nineties, at a tough time—financially and personally—for the artist, and paid a million dollars for several future works that he waited years to receive. He calls Koons’s output “bold and theatrical,” words that could well be engraved on a cornerstone of the museum; Broad adores punch. The sometimes bitterly voiced controversies that surround Koons seem to concern him not at all. It’s in Broad’s nature, when crossed or confronted, to plow forward with undeterred aplomb. He appears immune to grudges, seldom keeping for long the enemies he can’t help but make. (A history of scraps with Frank Gehry, in particular, has not obviated expressions, at least in public, of amity on both sides.) Koons’s sunny disposition and shame-free panache suit Broad, as does his work’s insouciant symbolizing of oligarchic noblesse oblige. Why would anyone gainsay immense wealth when looking at the delightful things that may be done with it? ♦
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The New York Art World Flocks to L.A. for The Broad Museum Opening Gala
Last night, about the same time that Marc Jacobs’s show brought a Hollywood premiere to midtown Manhattan, the Broad’s opening night gala hosted the New York art world in downtown Los Angeles. After a week that saw MOCA celebrate Matthew Barney’s “River of Fundament” and Gagosian debut new work by Urs Fischer, the city was primed to welcome its newest cultural landmark.
Upon arriving—and after first taking in Rachel Feinstein, characteristically dazzling in Gucci—it was impossible to ignore that seemingly every major New York institution was represented at the inauguration of Grand Avenue’s new crown jewel: There was Ann Temkin from MoMA, the Met’s Sheena Wagstaff, the Guggenheim’s Ari Wiseman, New Museum director Lisa Phillips, Thelma Golden of the Studio Museum in Harlem, Whitney director Adam Weinberg, and Dia’s new director Jessica Morgan. Anyone who thought a personally funded operation couldn’t be taken seriously in the museum ecosystem has never met Eli Broad.
The Diller Scofidio + Renfro building—to my eye, a stonework riff on the National Aquatics Center from the Beijing Olympics—is now home to nearly 2,000 works from Eli and Edythe Broad’s encyclopedic collection of blue-chip contemporary art. It’s hard not to see the space as a resplendent trophy room, the proud product of decades of big-game collecting. One enters via an escalator that passes through an organic-shaped concrete tube (the best guess for its inspiration might be an elephant trunk) that opens into a white-walled warehouse that has a number of Christopher Wool word paintings and a rainbow Jeff Koons balloon. Not impressed? There are cavernous galleries devoted to artists like Takashi Murakami and (you guessed it) Koons, making each room feel like a mini retrospective, complemented last night by the artists themselves. There is a Yayoi Kusama Infinity Room, which of course had a queue to enter even on opening night. Still nonplussed? There are also quieter moments at The Broad, like a gallery dedicated to Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors—a nine-channel video that felt persuasive and intimate, even in black tie.
After a tour of the museum, last night’s guests traversed Grand Avenue, which had been shut down and covered in a red carpet, for a dinner accompanied by the L.A. Philharmonic, who played the theme songs to The Godfather and Titanic, in case anyone had forgotten which coast they were on. After all, The Broad is, if nothing else, really about L.A. When it opens to the public on Sunday, The Broad will be free of charge, making it feel like a genuinely generous addition to the city. In that regard, at least, it’s the ne plus ultra.
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Unveiled: The Broad art museum by Diller Scofidio + Renfro opens
After years of hype, development and anticipation, philanthropist Eli Broad’s contemporary art museum, The Broad, is finally opening this weekend on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles. The 120,00 square foot, $140 million project, designed by New York architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, contains almost 2,000 of Broad’s contemporary art pieces as well as storage, conservation facilities, offices, an auditorium, and an adjacent restaurant and park.
It’s arguably the most significant new building – both culturally and architecturally – in the city since its neighbour, Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall, opened in 2003. And in many ways, the Broad is a direct response to Disney’s riotous, gleaming form. How could a new edifice try to out-Gehry Gehry? Instead it’s a very different, eroded structure, covered by a ‘veil’ of tapered, honeycomb-shaped fiberglass reinforced concrete panels. That form – and pretty much everything else about the building – wraps around its heart, known as the ‘vault’, which contains storage for the prodigious collection behind heavy concrete walls. DSR Project Director Kevin Rice calls the vault the ‘protagonist’ of the design, despite the fact that the veil gets all the attention.
On the underside of the vault is the lobby, a carved out, (relatively) dimly lit first floor space with smooth, cool walls evocative of a cave. Its organic shape was concieved to contrast with the rigid, computer-produced uniformity of the veil. ‘Throwing you off your expectations with its organic form is the perfect way to transition from the street to taking in the art itself,’ says Joanne Heyler, Director of the Broad Art Foundation. The entrance level also contains simple but spacious galleries – in most museums their 18-foot height would be formidable – for temporary exhibitions.
The third floor contains the building’s highlight: the 35,000 square foot, 23-foot-tall gallery space, glowing with rhythmic, controlled natural light from huge scooped and angled skylights, and from repeated cuts in the veil. The dinosaur-like scale of the skylights, and the lack of any columns – thanks to giant steel girders hidden above – has a mesmerizing impact, especially coming from the darker, more compressed spaces below. ‘I’m incredibly pleased with how the collection lives under the diffuse light,’ says Heyler.
Connecting varied spaces through dramatic transition is a particular specialty of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and they follow through deftly here, creating moments like the veil lifting up to welcome visitors at ground level, the tube-like escalator (and magical glass cylinder elevator) cutting through the bulk of the vault to the main galleries, and the voyeur-like peeks into the vault along the winding stairs back down. ‘We like to think of our projects as cinematic,’ said DSR principal Charles Renfro. ‘There’s a kind of narrative unfolding. There’s foreshadowing. There are glimpses ahead. Things get stitched together to form a complete experience.’ Rice adds, ‘It’s not a secret we always wanted to be filmmakers.’
The pierced solidity of the veil excels inside, where slivers of glowing light create a radiating, mysterious effect. The striking exterior is also lightened by the fact that (thanks to what Rice calls an “epic” second floor cantilever) it only touches the ground once on Grand Avenue. In the upper gallery, the necessary measure of dividing art through temporary walls breaks up what is a glorious space, perhaps minimizing its potential. The dividing walls are still a few feet from the ceiling, connecting you to the whole.
But in all this is a spectacular addition the city; a dynamic, fluid, and cohesive, if not radical, monument to L.A.’s quickly ascending place in the cultural universe. While it won’t singlehandedly mend the scorched earth urbanism of Bunker Hill, it has already infused an already white-hot downtown Los Angeles with more energy, clout, and, of course, attention.
We have explored the brand new Broad in a bespoke photoshoot in our October 2015 issue, where Liz Diller, of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is one of our two esteemed Guest Editors. In the issue you can also find Diller’s conversation with graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister, where she reflects on the practice’s significant body of work and, of course, the Broad.
Read more at http://www.wallpaper.com/architecture/unveiled-the-broad-art-museum-by-diller-scofidio-renfro-opens#iCltoHAyqGHlyCEJ.99
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The New Broad Museum Brings LA Lots of Blue-Chip Art and a Few Surprises
LOS ANGELES — The wait is over. After a 15-month delay, ballooning costs, and lawsuits, the Broad Museum is finally set to open this Sunday in downtown Los Angeles. The new 120,000 square foot institution houses the postwar and contemporary art collection of Eli and Edythe Broad. For the past four decades, the couple has had an outsized influence on the cultural life of LA. Eli Broad was a founding chairman of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in 1979; he lent his financial support to the Hammer Museum in the 1990s; he was responsible for the Broad Contemporary Art Museum pavilion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in the 2000s; and bailed out MOCA when it was on the verge of bankruptcy in 2008. Some of these relationships eventually soured, ending in controversy, such as his decision to simply loan his works to LACMA, not donate them, as was widely assumed. It was not a huge surprise then, when he announced in 2008 that he would be building his own museum, one where he presumably wouldn’t have to deal with competing institutional interests.
Yesterday’s press event was packed with arts writers, TV crews, and radio personalities, all waiting to get our first glimpse inside of the building, finally filled with art. We’ve been watching the progress of the building — adventurously designed by architecture firm Diller, Scofidio + Renfro — for the past few years, but only a few select critics had seen the collection installed. The street in front of the museum was shut down for the event. Free of cars — a rarity in LA — Grand Avenue had an odd post-apocalyptic feel. We gathered under the beaming LA sun, in front of the building’s porous white façade — the “veil” as it’s called — to hear opening remarks from philanthropists Eli and Edythe, the Broad Founding Director Joanne Heyler, LA Mayor Eric Garcetti, and architect Elizabeth Diller.
Garcetti hailed the Broad as further proof that LA had arrived as a major art capital on the level of — or even surpassing — New York. Diller spoke about the museum’s design, and the challenges inherent in working in the shadow of Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall just across the street. “We realized that we couldn’t compete, so we opted for a relationship of contrast to our neighbor: porous and matte next to smooth and shiny. We brought our exuberant curves inside the building.” She joked about Broad’s notoriously controlling manner. “Thank for you participating so closely in the process, Eli. Maybe too closely. We were duly warned.” Then, after a series of photo ops, we were mercifully allowed out of the sun and into the cool, grey, undulating interior of the Broad’s lobby, like kids in an art candy store.
Until now, most of the attention has been on the building’s design. Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s “vault and the veil” concept puts the Broad’s entire 2,000 piece collection (minus Charles Ray’s “Firetruck”) into a 21,000 square foot storage facility in the building’s core. Around this “vault” on the second floor, there are 50,000 square feet of exhibition space on the first and third floor. Impressive engineering allows the top floor exhibition space to be virtually unencumbered by support beams or walls. Two windows in the stairwell allow visitors to peer into the vault giving the impression of transparency. There is something to be said for the thrill of being able to glimpse behind the curtain, but it’s unclear if this will translate to a greater institutional transparency or if it’s just a cool gimmick.
The museum’s exterior, the “veil,” is a honeycombed, perforated shell that wraps around the building, allowing natural light to filter into the exhibition spaces, and reinforcing a connection to the street outside. This was one of the costliest and most problematic elements of construction, and it has also been the butt of jokes likening the building to a cheese grater among other things.
A break in the façade, dubbed the oculus, behind which sits a conference room, have inspired comparisons to the Death Star with Broad sitting in as the Emperor. It’s an intriguing design overall, but $140 million seems like a steep price tag for intrigue.
But what about the art? The Broad Collection has received some criticism for lacking a consistent vision, or for being dated, or for being too trendy. It is after all, a subjective collection reflecting the tastes of only two individuals. It would be surprising if it wasn’t uneven. After reading more than a few articles about Broad’s passion for Koons (he owns 34), I expected to see mostly flashy, blockbuster artworks — perfect for our current moment of inflation and speculation — and while there are quite a few of those, that’s not the whole story.
After riding the long escalator from the dim lobby, and emerging in the sun-drenched third floor galleries, I was pleasantly surprised to be greeted by stunning works by Mark Bradford, Julie Mehretu, and El Anatsui, giving a prominent place to works by female artists, queer artists, and artists of color. Sure, Koons and Christopher Wool held down the opposite side of the room as if to say, “Not so fast!” but it was at least a step in the right direction. The rest of the collection swayed between these two poles: the strain of glossy, slick Pop of which Koons is the current reigning champ, and more socially-oriented work, often created by groups traditionally under-represented in the art world, like women and people of color. The Broad’s director Joanne Heyler said as much when she told me: “I like the idea that a museum in the complex world that we live in is filled with many types of art. One important part is artists who still feel strongly that painful, difficult things in our social condition today need to be addressed.”
The spacious top floor is the historic basis of the collection, featuring work from the past sixty years. It is not a comprehensive overview, but tells a specific story based on the Broad’s interest. Canonical artists like Warhol, Twombly, Johns ,and Rauschenberg are well represented. Significantly, so are LA artists like Mike Kelley, John Baldessari, Charles Ray, Chris Burden, and Ed Ruscha. There are crowd pleasers like Damien Hirst, but also Kara Walker cut-outs and in-your-face Barbara Kruger works.
German artists Anselm Kiefer and Joseph Beuys have a room, as do Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and John Ahearn — New York artists who epitomized an earlier boom time. Something almost all of the works have in common is their formidable size, which was surely a major consideration when designing the building. Smaller works would most certainly be dwarfed by the architecture.
The first floor is dedicated to works from the past fifteen years, and will hold thematic exhibitions. This section is more uneven, though the possibility of shows with a curatorial intent other that highlighting the collection is promising. The Takashi Murakami room here resembles a garish theme park, whereas Ragnar Kjartansson’s 9-screen video piece “The Visitors” provides a pensive and touching alternative. Combining the blockbuster with the meditative is Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Room,” which can fill even the most jaded art goers with awe.
The Broad isn’t the one museum that’s going to save LA, or make the world respect us as an art capital. It reflects the tastes of two collectors, which as Holland Cotter noted in the New York Times, is actually a throwback to the previous century’s great museums founded by the likes of Morgan and Frick. Admission to the Broad will be free, allowing a larger section of the population the ability to experience contemporary art, something that many more ostensibly “democratic” museums do not offer. It is true that the collection may be uneven, but perhaps it makes sense to think of the Broad, as William Poundstone suggests, as simply one more part of the messy and diffuse cultural landscape that is LA.
The Broad Museum offers free but timed tickets, which are available on their website. The Museum officially opens to the public on Saturday, September 19, 2015.
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LOS ANGELES — Traditional art museums are some of the most conservative and controlling institutions on earth. They are built as vaults to preserve the past, and as monuments to edited histories. In the Gilded Age America of a century or so ago, many new museums were also monuments to private collectors — Henry Clay Frick, J. P. Morgan, Isabella Stewart Gardner — who strove to shape and fix an image that history would have of them, as enlightened power brokers of their day and benefactors to the future.
In our present Gilded Age, private collection museums are again proliferating, but with a difference. Most are devoted to new art, art without a past. The stories they tell are not yet history, but exist in a state of flux. The very definition of collecting, in a time of speculative buying, is now up for grabs. Shouldn’t these changes radically alter the old museum model, loosen it up, make it more experimental, shift its identity from locked treasure house to clearinghouse for fresh ideas?
These questions arise as one of the most eagerly anticipated private museums of contemporary art in the country approaches its opening here next week.
Called The Broad (pronounced brode) and housed in a $140 million, three-story building by Diller, Scofidio and Renfro, it enshrines the collection of some 2,000 works owned by Eli and Edythe Broad, two of this city’s leading philanthropists.
Mr. Broad, a billionaire who made his fortune in home building, has arguably had more impact shaping this city’s cultural identity than anyone else in recent times. For nearly 50 years, he and his wife have been among the country’s most assiduous contemporary collectors. They began picking up work by hot young artists — Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cindy Sherman — in Manhattan in the early 1980s, later filling in historical blanks and doing some buying in their own California backyard.
The inaugural display is clearly intended to show the collection in representative form, and does. The museum’s founding director and chief curator, Joanne Heyler, has installed some 200 works more or less chronologically on the building’s skylighted third floor, beginning with a clutch of classic pieces by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly. Mr. Johns’s 1964 “Watchman” is a star; a blood-red Rauschenberg abstraction from a decade earlier is less familiar, but the Broads cashed in a Van Gogh drawing to acquire it.
Andy Warhol, whose Campbell’s Soup Can pictures Ms. Broad first saw (but didn’t buy) as early as the 1960s, has a small gallery of his own; Roy Lichtenstein has a larger one. He is a Broad favorite; they own 34 pieces (there are 10 here), as is his successor in formally polished Pop, Jeff Koons, of whose works the Broads have the greatest number in private hands. Is this something to brag about? An argument can be made that Mr. Koons’s work usefully casts a cold eye on an American, and now global, addiction to bright, empty, throwaway things. But what happens when a presumably critical art is indistinguishable from its target, or is not critical after all? Then chances are good it’s headed for history’s scrap heap, eventually if not now.
Speaking of critical commentary, in an inspired compare-and-contrast move, Ms. Heyler has inserted a 1995 panoramic city painting by the Los Angeles artist Lari Pittman into the Koons gallery. Mr. Pittman’s work, too, comes out of a Pop corner and is formally airtight. It’s also conceptually razor-sharp. It deals with all the American subjects Mr. Koons does — sex, religion, celebrity, death — but with a focus and bite that he lacks.
The concentration of Los Angeles art is the most interesting aspect of the inaugural show, at least for this East Coast viewer. Ed Ruscha’s laconically meticulous word paintings and John Baldessari’s recycled film images may fit the collection’s clean-lined Pop proclivities, while the acidic zaniness of Mike Kelley’s work does not, but the Broads bought plenty of it over the years. I’m always glad to see it, and I’m even gladder to encounter things I’ve never seen, like the sculpture called “Bateau de Guerre” by the apocalypse-minded Chris Burden, who died in May. A whirring, blinking death star made of gas cans and toy guns, it wasn’t in the recent Burden retrospective that came to New York.
I wish there were more things like it here, under-known, offbeat, less than neat. And there could be. With a reported $200- million-plus endowment and additional funds for acquisitions — nearly that of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art combined — the Broad will be doing a lot more buying. And it would be good if this museum started to stray from the blue-chip-masterpiece path that winds its way from Mr. Koons on the third floor to a gallery on the first floor of big, bland, abstract pictures by Mark Grotjahn and Christopher Wool, artists who, because they cover walls with work that is indisputably “art,” have become universal collection staples.
Their presence here makes the Broad feel ordinary, old-school, predictable. A tight, unadventurous building design doesn’t help. The exterior, with its sheets of perforated, biomorphic white cladding — the color and texture of gefilte fish — is eye-filling but unmagical, though there are nice touches inside. The cavernlike lobby sets up a mood of mystery. The third floor skylights are a pleasure, as are occasional breaks in the white-box gallery walls that give glimpses onto the street.
The street is Grand Avenue, which Mr. Broad, in consultation with the city government, has long planned to develop into a downtown cultural district. The Broad is part of that plan. So is the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall next door to it, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, which Mr. Broad helped found and has generously supported, directly across the street. In a stretched-out, traffic-clogged city it takes a long time to travel anywhere. You need a good reason to go where you’re going. By offering free admission, Mr. Broad intends his museum to be a popular destination.
It surely will be while it’s new, and in the news, and could continue to be. The Broads have always viewed their holdings as a public asset that they make accessible through an active institutional loan program. They refer to their holdings as a lending library, with items regularly leaving for other museums and returning. This traffic flow, enhanced by the arrival of new acquisitions, should encourage people to make repeat visits, knowing they are likely to see new things each time.
But even with this mechanism for flexibility, the Broad is a museum of an old-fashioned kind. It’s been built to preserve a private collection conceived on a masterpiece ideal and consisting almost entirely of distinctive objects: paintings and sculptures; precious things. Apart from most of the objects being new, or at least not old, the Broad could have existed, pretty much as is, a century ago.
John Ahearn’s “Raymond and Toby,” flanked by Keith Haring paintings. Credit Monica Almeida/The New York Times
But, of course, art itself has changed. It is no longer only about things, hasn’t been for decades. Since the great surge of dematerialization introduced by conceptualism in the 1960s, art has been about, among other things, ideas, actions, sounds, performance, networks, communication. The Broad will have to catch up with this alternative history, a history that the audience it wants to attract and hold already knows. What better way to do so than through collaboration with an institution that has a stake in exploring the same history, meaning, of course, the Museum of Contemporary Art across the street.
The two could share, to their mutual benefit, space, expertise and personnel. What they already share is a tough time for museums and a history with Mr. Broad, who, over a tireless half-century, has done wonders for art in this city, and, with the opening of his museum, is about to do more.
A Sept. 13 print version of this review included an incorrect byline in some editions. It is by Holland Cotter, not Bernard Holland.
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ENTERTAINMENT ARTS & CULTURE
Review: An early look in the Broad museum reveals a show that doesn’t quite gel
Entertainment Broad Museum Jackson Pollock Walt Disney Concert Hall Julian Schnabel Los Angeles County Museum of Art Eli Broad
An early look in the Broad museum reveals a show that doesn’t quite gel
Christopher Knight
Los Angeles Times
christopher.knight@latimes.com
A view of works by Roy Lichtenstein inside the Broad museum. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times / © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein)
The city’s urban culture gulch is on the brink of opening a major new art museum — L.A.’s seventh — as the Broad finishes preparations for its Sept. 20 debut downtown.
The flashy new building stands next to Walt Disney Concert Hall and REDCAT and across Grand Avenue from the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Colburn School. The latest project of billionaire philanthropists and art collectors Eli and Edythe Broad, it launches with a 50,000-square-foot exhibition drawn exclusively from its wide-ranging permanent collection.
FULL COVERAGE: Broad Museum
Unfortunately the show doesn’t gel, although many works are superlative. Roughly 250 pieces by about 60 artists have been chosen from around 2,000 possibilities by nearly 200 artists.
The Broad
Caption The Broad
Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times / © Cy Twombly
Installation view of Cy Twombly works.
The Broad
Caption The Broad
Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times and © 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / ARS, NY
A space for Andy Warhol works.
Any curator will tell you that it takes time to learn a new building’s personality quirks — to figure out how best to configure temporary walls, take advantage of sight lines that let art pull a visitor through the galleries and calibrate an installation so that objects visually speak to one another. The Broad’s inaugural installation began only in June. That’s quick.
Three visits over that relatively brief period revealed a work in evolutionary progress, with many changes along the way. Some may yet come before doors open to a curious public next week.
The museum bills the exhibition as “a sweeping, chronological journey” through the collection. But, in addition to feeling random (why this artist and not that one?), much of the best work has been seen before. Two large Broad exhibitions — in 2001 and 2008 — were held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, so this opening has a lot of déjà vu.
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The strongest feature is the collection’s depth in the representation of individual artists, especially Pop-related. When the couple commit to acquiring an artist’s work, usually they collect in depth — a practice surely inspired by the example of Giuseppe and Giovanna Panza di Biumo, the great Italian collectors of postwar American art whose collection is an anchor at MOCA.
Few museums have the resources to acquire, say, two dozen Jeff Koons sculptures, as the Broad has. (The inaugural features eight — plus one dreadful painting, a medium for which he has no talent.) Several bountiful single-artist rooms make you linger longer.
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Among Andy Warhol’s 11 paintings is a 1962 “Dance Diagram” correctly displayed on the floor, not hanging on a wall. (It’s meant to send up Jackson Pollock, who dripped paint while dancing around a canvas unfurled on the floor.) Roy Lichtenstein’s 10 Pop paintings provide a stunning survey of his 1960s breakthrough, giving mass-media makeovers to Impressionist, Fauve, Cubist and other historic paintings.
Just four Ellsworth Kelly paintings fill another room, but their seamless fusion of bold geometric shapes, crisp composition and saturated colors grabs you by the lapels. Among them is one from a breakout 1963 series, a masterpiece acquired two years ago.
A vivid green rectangle and a bright blue oval are surrounded by a crimson field. All calmly share the same flat plane, perfectly balanced in scale and chromatic intensity, yet straining to burst their optical bonds. Kelly makes poise look easy.
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NYT Holand Cotter liked what he saw. I will go with that and plan to visit in October when I arrive LA from Boston.
beverlyjfreeman
at 2:56 PM September 13, 2015
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Closer to the present, five paintings and sculptures by Takashi Murakami push the collection’s Pop art focus forward in time. Murakami’s creepy cartoon cheerfulness about a Japanese society riven by post-atomic tensions takes a monumental turn in a new, 82-foot-long mural.
“In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow” conjures a mythic narrative inspired by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that tore open the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Great waves of storm-tossed sea monsters cavort around a grim mountain of skulls — a landscape of elegant, stylishly sophisticated awfulness.
Writer Pico Iyer wryly observes in the 8-pound, 2-inch-thick collection catalog published to coincide with the show that wartime emperor Hirohito was buried with the Mickey Mouse wristwatch he snagged on a 1975 trip to Disneyland. Murakami’s art unpeels the perpetual violation of innocence that characterizes modern Japan.
The Broad museum
Caption The Broad museum
Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times
The Broad, a $140-million museum of modern and contemporary art, is set to open Sept. 20 on Grand Avenue.
The Broad museum
Caption The Broad museum
Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times
Diller Scofidio + Renfro designed the Broad museum and its eye-catching honeycomb facade, dubbed “the veil.”
Perhaps the most viscerally gorgeous room is Cy Twombly’s, with seven lush paintings and three ghostly sculptures. A difficult artist, especially for audiences of the “My Child Could Do That” school of fusty art criticism, Twombly’s paintings mix drawing and writing. The aim is to free them from established strictures of earth-bound depiction.
It’s no mean feat. An epic array of unruly lines unfolds — tightly crabbed scratches, abstract penmanship and luxurious, billowing slathers. Marks lodge inside or sometimes bleed through translucent layers of paint, bursting through the pentimento into enormous floral thunderclouds. Twombly’s art is like an insistent echo of forgotten graffiti, murmuring from ancient walls.
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I wish the exhibition continued on this way, with only monographic rooms. A core collecting philosophy for nearly 40 years would take center stage.
Instead, except for rooms for John Currin and Glenn Ligon, the show mostly flips into conventional mode. Packaged art movements popular in New York in the late 1970s and after are chronicled. Blandness settles in.
Galleries advance the image-scavenging of appropriation art, such as Richard Prince’s sly painting of an old barroom joke and Sherrie Levine’s cast-bronze copy of a Marcel Duchamp urinal. Neo-Expressionism includes the smashed crockery of Julian Schnabel and the psycho-sexual unease of Eric Fischl’s suburbia, both rejecting Minimal and Conceptual coolness and returning to easel painting. In graffiti art, socially marginalized artists like African American whiz-kid Jean-Michel Basquiat and gay activist Keith Haring invade the patrician canvas with the street’s rough-and-tumble.
A choppy, incomplete history is told with too many works juxtaposed in spaces too confined. Many individual works are fine but together feel jumbled and thin.
One feature gives me the willies. It concerns conservation of fragile art. The show is peppered with works on paper, photographic and painted, which should be kept from sunlight but aren’t.
It’s divided between a first-floor suite of rooms, which in the future will house temporary and traveling shows, and a wide-open third-floor space, topped by a dramatic ceiling. A 35,000-square-foot honeycomb of fixed skylights faces north, bringing in flat, cool, filtered natural light.
How Edye Broad’s ‘natural eye’ drew her billionaire husband into the art world
How Edye Broad’s ‘natural eye’ drew her billionaire husband into the art world
Display cases for 16 of Cindy Sherman’s great “Untitled Film Stills,” which ooze all-American anxiety, have the photos lying flat and facing up at the skylights. A monumental Mike Kelley acrylic on paper shows nested picture frames around the tiny vista of a bucolic mountain cabin, which gets swallowed up in a psychedelic frenzy of painted wood-grain that surrounds it.
Barbara Kruger transforms the language of popular graphic design into a subversive threat in an oversized photo-triptych of a sleek, predatory jungle cat underscored by the off-kilter legend, “Make my day.” Jasper Johns’ exquisite 1960 study “White Flag,” an ironic symbol that pleads for negotiated surrender, makes me gulp: It’s oil on newspaper on paper over lithograph.
A triple whammy. Museum director Joanne Heyler, who organized the show with Eli Broad, assures me that conservation precautions are being taken and works will rotate. But why take the risk? I’d feel better if the paper works were all downstairs, shielded from the mischievous sun.
That vast skylight is integral to the building’s narrative. When the $140-million museum was going up, attention was riveted on the façade’s elaborate lattice work, punctuated by a bellybutton window out front. The New York architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro dubbed the lattice a “veil” shrouding the museum’s inner “vault,” which houses the $2-billion art collection.
Arts and culture in pictures by The Times
Caption Arts and culture in pictures by The Times
Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times photographers document the year in arts and culture.
Arts and culture in pictures by The Times | Malaviki Sarukkai
Caption Arts and culture in pictures by The Times | Malaviki Sarukkai
Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times
Malaviki Sarukkai performing at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica on July 19, 2015. Sarukkai is the best-known exponent of South Indian classical dance.
But inside the front door an eccentric, head-turning entrance hall is now revealed. Undulating walls and ceiling in dark gray plaster create a long, narrow, organic space. Think urban cavern. The room is a theatrical imitation of a cavity burrowed deep inside the Earth.
It’s art-spelunking time: Welcome to Plato’s Cave.
Plato, student of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle, used his famous myth of the cave, where deceptive shadows lurk, to frame an aesthetic quandary: Does art’s friction between illusion and reality generate light or merely heat?
Board the Broad’s 105-foot escalator or glass-enclosed elevator, and you shoot up two floors, “Star Trek”-style, past the second-floor vault to the galleries above. There, art is poised between the shadowy illusion below and the clear California sun above.
cComments
NYT Holand Cotter liked what he saw. I will go with that and plan to visit in October when I arrive LA from Boston.
beverlyjfreeman
at 2:56 PM September 13, 2015
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5
The design’s pop-classical mythologizing is likely to slip by unnoticed to most visitors. (Maybe Hirohito would see Pirates of the Caribbean in the entry, not Plato’s Cave.) Theme architecture is always a bit much.
Anyhow, art does it better. Dead ahead off the escalator, Koons’ big, multicolored flower sculpture is laid out at the public’s feet — a fond welcome offering. Machined in stainless steel, these giant tulips, pristine and perfected, will never wilt, unlike nature’s fragile kind.
They’re beyond death. Koons flips the traditional role still-life flowers play, symbolizing mortality.
He further invokes the legendary tulip mania of 17th century Holland. The era also marks the art market’s modern emergence. Paintings and tulip bulbs became mediums of fevered commercial exchange.
“Tulips” tells us something we don’t always want to hear. The prospect of immortality, however vain, can be vested in precincts of incalculable wealth and extraordinary power. Like pyramids, say. Or the Broad.
The sculpture’s witty placement underscores the narrowness of the collection. It’s mainly rich in blue-chip art, defined by market value decided through consistent years of sales and confirmed at auction.
The market, subject to commercial limitations, is hardly infallible. It leaves a lot out. That’s why the show’s “sweep” feels choppy, and why about 80% of the 92 artists featured in the collection’s new catalog are male, which the art market favors.
It’s also why the show stresses art from New York and Europe, where art’s primary trading floors are located, but not Los Angeles, where the collection was assembled. Ironically, in “Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell,” his cheeky 1966-68 sign painting, L.A.’s John Baldessari gives the sardonic lowdown. “Paintings with cows and hens collect dust,” it declares, “while bulls and roosters sell.”
Markets always distinguish between what’s salable and what’s not, but they can’t calculate quality.
===
WASHINGTON POST
Museums
The problem with The Broad is the collection itself
Co-founders of The Broad, Eli and Edythe Broad, in the third-floor galleries. (Elizabeth Daniels /Courtesy of The Broad)
By Philip Kennicott September 13 at 5:47 PM
LOS ANGELES — Eli Broad, the wealthy philanthropist who is about to open a major new museum in Los Angeles, is a billionaire straight from central casting. He is a self-made man in the quintessential American industry — home construction — who has also built and burnt bridges all across this sprawling city. Ask around, and no one seems to like him, though many call him effective and all agree he is the city’s supremely influential cultural leader, a Tamburlaine of contemporary art. They admire his brilliance, covet his money, fear his power and lament his character, which is described as imperious, egomaniacal and relentless.
Next Sunday, Broad and his wife, Edythe, will open The Broad, a $140 million museum that will store and display the Broad Collection, some 2,000 works, with a new one being added, on average, about once a week. Located next to Los Angeles’s iconic landmark of contemporary architecture, the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Broad is designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the New York firm that created the Highline, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and was slated to design the ill-fated and unrealized temporary “Bubble” space for the Hirshhorn in Washington.
The juxtaposition is striking. Gehry’s Disney Hall is set at an angle to the street, and it shimmers, gleams and curves in all directions, while the Broad faces Grand Avenue squarely with a cool, white, box-like form covered in what the architects call a “veil” of perforated glass-fiber reinforced concrete. But even more striking than the contrast with the Gehry building is the Broad’s subtle argument with much of recent museum design. The prevailing theology of many public buildings today, including too many museums, is about erasing the line between the city and the structure, so that one feels the excitement of urban energy ever present, even while looking at art. The most salient example is the new Whitney Museum in New York, which makes love to Manhattan so eagerly that one can’t help but gape at the city’s promiscuous ubiquity.
The Broad is more inward looking, and allows for a more contemplative experience. Perhaps without intending to do so, it recaptures some of the spiritual drama of the much-maligned monumental museums of yesteryear: Fundamental to any tour of the Broad is a long escalator ride from the lobby level to the acre-square expanse of open, column-free exhibition space on the third floor. This escalation performs much of the same function as the wide, monumental steps that front many of the museums built a century ago. It separates the visitor from the city and from his cares, cars and concerns; it is a narthex for the age of distraction, allowing the mind to rebirth itself into a state of greater focus and spiritual expectation.
The escalator connects the two essential elements of the building. The “veil” is the exoskeleton, punctured by diagonal cuts and distended windows that look a bit like the webbed packing material that has mercifully replaced Styrofoam peanuts. At street level, the Grand Avenue corners of the veil lift up, recalling the shaved corner of the redesigned Juilliard School at Lincoln Center, another DS+R project. These triangular portals scoop in visitors from the street, who then discover the voluptuously non-Euclidean lobby, a space that feels both subterranean and monumental at the same time, like caverns measureless to man, or the underbelly of some enormous prehistoric mammal.
The undulating ceiling of the lobby is part of what the architects calls “the vault.” The Broads have long conceived of their collection as a “lending library” of art, and they wanted that collection stored on site. Ordinarily, that would mean creating a lot of back of house space with a storage facility hidden from view.
“We decided to turn that liability into a protagonist,” says Elizabeth Diller, one of the founding partners of DS+R. So the vault became a separate structural element inside the enveloping veil, not just a place to store art, but also a kind of mushroom in a box, overhanging the lobby from a giant cantilever, with the third-floor exhibition hall on the mushroom’s cap.
“You are always in relation to it,” says Diller. “It hovers over you, you shoot through it, you snake back through it and you come back out underneath it.” The museum’s circulation pattern offers visitors glimpses into the vault’s storage space as well, with its sliding racks of art visible from the complex descending staircase visitors follow after exploring the main gallery on the third floor.
All of this rests on a massive scaffolding that covers a three-floor parking structure. So it is a complex structure with dramatic but strikingly intuitive results. In some ways it recalls Gordon Bunshaft’s Beinecke Library at Yale, where the books are contained in a core glass-lined internal tower, surrounded by a dramatic translucent skin that mediates the light, while shutting out the world. It also has affinities with the old Whitney Building, designed by Marcel Breuer, which dramatically invites the visitor to step out of the world so as to see the world, through art, with renewed vigor.
It isn’t, of course, a perfect building. A lecture hall on the second floor feels austere and charmless, and is, surprisingly, the only interior place where one can experience one of the most whimsical features of the building, an oculus that looks from the outside like a thumb print or tiny crater in the veil. But the oculus doesn’t make much sense from inside the lecture hall, which is tiny and dispiriting. And a round elevator, which gives access from the lobby to the third floor, terminates in a distracting glass case in the middle of the main exhibition space.
The main problem, however, isn’t the building, but the Broad collection itself. More than 250 works are on display, and too many of them are the usual high-end trash. The volume of work chosen for the inaugural exhibition, on both the third floor and a smaller first-floor gallery that will eventually be used for temporary shows, is overwhelming. Partition walls clutter the third floor, and obliterate its spatial drama. And too many of the works are so large, and importune the visitor so aggressively, that one feels hectored by hectares of art.
Even though the bad overwhelms the great, there are great works throughout, including a magnificent room devoted to Cy Twombly documenting the arc of his career, iconic Pop works of the 1960s, and compelling art by Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari and Jasper Johns. A room of Ellsworth Kelly is too constrained for the work to have impact, as is a giant piece by Robert Therrien, his 1994 “Under the Table,” which is a Brobdingnagian table and chairs stuffed into a Lilliputian gallery at one corner of the top floor.
Someone has taken care, here and there, to make smart moments amid the clangor, but Jeff Koons always wins. The first gallery encountered has large-scale, but effective work by Julie Mehretu, El Anatsui, and Mark Bradford, pieces that accentuate the drama of the exterior world you’ve left behind. Mehretu’s “Cairo,” 2013, recalls the Freudian overlays of history and the unconscious that are the essence of the megalopolis lifestyle; Bradford’s “Corner of Desire and Piety,” 2008, references the social failures of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe and by extension the frailty and irrationality of the urban fabric; and the El Anatsui tapestry, “Red Black,” 2010, undulating on the wall, recalls the skin of the museum itself, woven of many pieces, with a curious declivity dramatizing its strength. But a large Jeff Koons piece is droning nearby, vitiating thought with its generic monotone of irony.
A few spaces for video offer relief, including Ragnar Kjartansson magnificent “The Visitors,” 2012, and a room devoted to William Kentridge. But video doesn’t seem to be an essential part of this first display, nor are there oases of smaller work or works on paper to modulate the experience. Big is the theme, and it’s exhausting.
So leave the building and lest anyone deprecate it too much — which is inevitable given the local swelling and indigestion that Broad’s name seems to cause in this town — stand at the corner of Grand Avenue and Second Street. Behind you is Gehry’s metal masterpiece; before you is an estimable refusal to be intimidated by it. And if you look down the north face of the building, the angle of the distended cuts in the veil seem to be absorbing the power of the bright blue sky, radiating it down to the ground, while along the Grand Street façade the same energies seem to flow up out of the sidewalk and back to the heavens. The veil has an energy of its own, a force field protecting a dramatic rarity: a space for art that respects the experience of looking and engagement, as a thing apart, and something worth leaving the world behind to do on its own terms.
The Broad, located at 221 S. Grand Avenue in Los Angeles, opens to the public on Sept. 20. For more information visit http://www.thebroad.org.
Philip Kennicott is the Pulitzer Prize-winning Art and Architecture Critic of The Washington Post. He has been on staff at the Post since 1999, first as Classical Music Critic, then as Culture Critic.
Co-founders of The Broad, Eli and Edythe Broad, in the third-floor galleries. (Elizabeth Daniels /Courtesy of The Broad)
By Philip Kennicott September 13 at 5:47 PM
LOS ANGELES — Eli Broad, the wealthy philanthropist who is about to open a major new museum in Los Angeles, is a billionaire straight from central casting. He is a self-made man in the quintessential American industry — home construction — who has also built and burnt bridges all across this sprawling city. Ask around, and no one seems to like him, though many call him effective and all agree he is the city’s supremely influential cultural leader, a Tamburlaine of contemporary art. They admire his brilliance, covet his money, fear his power and lament his character, which is described as imperious, egomaniacal and relentless.
Next Sunday, Broad and his wife, Edythe, will open The Broad, a $140 million museum that will store and display the Broad Collection, some 2,000 works, with a new one being added, on average, about once a week. Located next to Los Angeles’s iconic landmark of contemporary architecture, the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Broad is designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the New York firm that created the Highline, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and was slated to design the ill-fated and unrealized temporary “Bubble” space for the Hirshhorn in Washington.
The juxtaposition is striking. Gehry’s Disney Hall is set at an angle to the street, and it shimmers, gleams and curves in all directions, while the Broad faces Grand Avenue squarely with a cool, white, box-like form covered in what the architects call a “veil” of perforated glass-fiber reinforced concrete. But even more striking than the contrast with the Gehry building is the Broad’s subtle argument with much of recent museum design. The prevailing theology of many public buildings today, including too many museums, is about erasing the line between the city and the structure, so that one feels the excitement of urban energy ever present, even while looking at art. The most salient example is the new Whitney Museum in New York, which makes love to Manhattan so eagerly that one can’t help but gape at the city’s promiscuous ubiquity.
The Broad is more inward looking, and allows for a more contemplative experience. Perhaps without intending to do so, it recaptures some of the spiritual drama of the much-maligned monumental museums of yesteryear: Fundamental to any tour of the Broad is a long escalator ride from the lobby level to the acre-square expanse of open, column-free exhibition space on the third floor. This escalation performs much of the same function as the wide, monumental steps that front many of the museums built a century ago. It separates the visitor from the city and from his cares, cars and concerns; it is a narthex for the age of distraction, allowing the mind to rebirth itself into a state of greater focus and spiritual expectation.
The escalator connects the two essential elements of the building. The “veil” is the exoskeleton, punctured by diagonal cuts and distended windows that look a bit like the webbed packing material that has mercifully replaced Styrofoam peanuts. At street level, the Grand Avenue corners of the veil lift up, recalling the shaved corner of the redesigned Juilliard School at Lincoln Center, another DS+R project. These triangular portals scoop in visitors from the street, who then discover the voluptuously non-Euclidean lobby, a space that feels both subterranean and monumental at the same time, like caverns measureless to man, or the underbelly of some enormous prehistoric mammal.
The undulating ceiling of the lobby is part of what the architects calls “the vault.” The Broads have long conceived of their collection as a “lending library” of art, and they wanted that collection stored on site. Ordinarily, that would mean creating a lot of back of house space with a storage facility hidden from view.
“We decided to turn that liability into a protagonist,” says Elizabeth Diller, one of the founding partners of DS+R. So the vault became a separate structural element inside the enveloping veil, not just a place to store art, but also a kind of mushroom in a box, overhanging the lobby from a giant cantilever, with the third-floor exhibition hall on the mushroom’s cap.
“You are always in relation to it,” says Diller. “It hovers over you, you shoot through it, you snake back through it and you come back out underneath it.” The museum’s circulation pattern offers visitors glimpses into the vault’s storage space as well, with its sliding racks of art visible from the complex descending staircase visitors follow after exploring the main gallery on the third floor.
All of this rests on a massive scaffolding that covers a three-floor parking structure. So it is a complex structure with dramatic but strikingly intuitive results. In some ways it recalls Gordon Bunshaft’s Beinecke Library at Yale, where the books are contained in a core glass-lined internal tower, surrounded by a dramatic translucent skin that mediates the light, while shutting out the world. It also has affinities with the old Whitney Building, designed by Marcel Breuer, which dramatically invites the visitor to step out of the world so as to see the world, through art, with renewed vigor.
It isn’t, of course, a perfect building. A lecture hall on the second floor feels austere and charmless, and is, surprisingly, the only interior place where one can experience one of the most whimsical features of the building, an oculus that looks from the outside like a thumb print or tiny crater in the veil. But the oculus doesn’t make much sense from inside the lecture hall, which is tiny and dispiriting. And a round elevator, which gives access from the lobby to the third floor, terminates in a distracting glass case in the middle of the main exhibition space.
The main problem, however, isn’t the building, but the Broad collection itself. More than 250 works are on display, and too many of them are the usual high-end trash. The volume of work chosen for the inaugural exhibition, on both the third floor and a smaller first-floor gallery that ==
ENTERTAINMENT ARTS & CULTURE
Review : The new Broad museum, though efficiently designed, really only comes alive on the periphery
Christopher Hawthorne
Los Angeles Times
christopher.hawthorne@latimes.com
A wall of glass peeks out from under the Broad museum’s honeycomb facade, a striking element on a stretch of Grand Avenue that also features Disney Hall. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times)
It’s a depressingly reliable fact of Los Angeles architecture: Nothing comes easily on Bunker Hill.
In the five decades since city planners radically remade Grand Avenue in a burst of urban-renewal ambition, demolishing its Victorian-era houses and apartment buildings and carving the hilltop into vast super-blocks, architects have struggled to make sense of its peculiar, wide-open scale, which can swallow subtlety whole.
Arata Isozaki, Rafael Moneo and Wolf Prix are among the prominent architects to produce disappointing buildings along Grand. Even Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, ultimately a triumph, suffered agonizing delays and fundraising crises and took nearly 15 years to complete.
The newest addition to this uneven parade of high-rises, cultural buildings and still-empty parcels is the Broad, a $140-million museum of modern and contemporary art set to open Sept. 20 at the corner of Grand and 2nd Street.
An efficient three-story box of exhibition and archive space wrapped in an eye-catching, bone-white honeycomb of fiberglass-reinforced concrete panels, it was designed by the New York firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R for short), which won a small invited competition organized in 2010 by Eli Broad, the billionaire philanthropist and art collector.
Broad has had contentious relationships with architects over the years — in the 1980s, he hired Gehry to design a house in Brentwood only to fire him and recruit another firm to finish the job — and for this project set an aggressive construction timetable that was serially extended. In a related development, Broad has filed suit against the German company, Seele Inc., brought on to build the museum’s unusual latticed skin, saying fabrication errors added roughly $20 million to construction costs and delayed the opening by more than a year.
It wouldn’t be fair to say that the museum, which has moments of real charm, buckles under the burden of those expectations and conflicts. But in a number of places, including its surprisingly punchless facade, it shows the considerable strain of holding up that weight.
The elements of the Broad that have been most closely scrutinized or most often reworked, in fact, are the most uneven. It is only in the relative shadows — in the peripheral or easily overlooked spaces, or in the rooms added or enlarged late in the design process — that the architecture of the museum really comes to life.
Diller Scofidio + Renfro designed the Broad museum and its eye-catching honeycomb facade, dubbed “the veil.”
When you see the Broad from a distance, what stands out is a sense of near-total enclosure — the consistent cover of the white facade, which DS+R’s Elizabeth Diller refers to as the “veil” covering the “vault” of archive and office space filling most of the second floor.
The skin recalls the 1964 American Cement Building on Wilshire Boulevard, by the L.A. firm DMJM, as well as SANAA’s 2007 New Museum in New York and a range of postwar experiments in concrete shade screens by Le Corbusier and other modernist architects.
More to the point, it helps the Broad act as a foil to Disney Hall next door. Where the concert hall is reflective and extroverted, the museum is matte and mute.
==
Diller Scofidio + Renfro releases first official photos of The Broad
This first set of official images shows Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s The Broad art museum in Los Angeles ahead of its opening later this month (+ slideshow).
The photographs – including sets from Iwan Baan and Hufton+Crow – show the three-storey museum’s honeycomb exterior, cave-like lobby and a gallery space with a view of the latticed facade.
The 120,000-square-foot (11,150 square metre) building is located on Grand Avenue in downtown LA, across the street from Frank Gehry‘s Walt Disney Concert Hall.
Set to open 20 September 2015, The Broad will contain two floors of exhibition space for the display of contemporary art. It will also serve as the headquarters of The Broad Art Foundation’s lending library.
Described as a “veil and vault” concept, the design features a white exoskeleton that covers the exterior walls and roof. This wrapping – made up of 2,500 fibreglass-reinforced concrete elements – allows daylight to gently penetrate the interior without over-exposing the artwork.
A large opening along the front facade, referred to as an “oculus” by the architects, marks the location of a lecture hall on the second floor.
Related story: The Broad gallery by Diller Scofidio + Renfro speeds towards completion in Los Angeles
Speaking to Dezeen last year, Elizabeth Diller said she wanted the building to be strikingly different from Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall.
“We realised it was just useless to try to compete – there is no comparison to that building,” Diller said. “Compared to Disney Hall’s smooth and shiny exterior, which reflects light, The Broad is porous and absorptive, channelling light into the public spaces and galleries.”
The ground-level lobby is a cave-like space with curving walls sheathed in Venetian plaster. The galleries are located on the first and third floors, and a 105-foot-long (46 metre) escalator shuttles visitors from the lobby to the main gallery on the third floor.
At the centre of the building is a solid volume that serves as a storage area for the Broad’s collection. Windows punched into this “central mass” enables visitors to peer inside.
“Rather than relegate the storage to secondary status, the ‘vault’ plays a key role in shaping the museum experience from entry to exit,” said the museum. “Its heavy opaque mass is always in view, hovering midway in the building. Its carved underside shapes the lobby below, while its top surface is the floor plate of the exhibition space.”
“The vault stores the portions of the collection not on display in the galleries or on loan, but DS+R provided viewing windows so visitors can get a sense of the intensive depth of the collection and peer right into the storage holding,” the museum added.
DS+R won the commission in 2010 through a small invite-only competition. It worked with Gensler on the $140 million (£92 million) project.
The museum was founded by philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad, who also backed the Zaha Hadid-designed Edythe and Eli Broad Art Museum in Michigan, which opened in 2012.
The Broad in LA will be home to nearly 2,000 pieces of art from the couple’s collection – one of the most significant holdings of postwar and contemporary art in the world. The museum will be open six days a week with free general admission.
“We are pleased to offer free general admission so that affordability isn’t a criteria to see the art,” said Eli Broad in a statement. “We have been deeply moved by contemporary art and believe it inspires creativity and provokes and stimulates lively conversations. We hope visitors from Los Angeles and around the country and the world visit and are similarly enriched by this art.”
Journalists and a small number of public visitors, including Dezeen columnist Mimi Zeiger, were first given a preview of the The Broad in October 2014.
Related story: “A blob, a bridge, a tower, and a subway stop”
“The Broad is an object lesson for designers caught on the hamster wheel of producing interestingness,” said Zeiger. “The architecture succeeds in dampening the urge for entertainment, and makes the spectacular simply mundane.”
The museum is one of several major projects in LA signalling an architecture boom.
On Grand Avenue, LA resident Frank Gehry is planning a mixed-use development opposite his Walt Disney Concert Hall. He is also masterplanning an overhaul of the run-down LA River, and has just unveiled plans for a five-building complex on Sunset Strip. In Beverly Hills, Chinese firm MAD is planning its first US project – a residential block modelled on a hilltop village.
