Meet The Broad

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-broad-museum-review-20150913-column.html

Broad Museum
Diller, Scofidio and Renfro
Los Angeles, California
latimes.com

Hello Everyone:

The City of Los Angeles is getting ready to celebrate the opening of a new museum on September 20, 2015, in Downtown Los Angeles. The sparkling new museum is the latest endeavor of philanthropists and art collectors Eli and Edythe Broad.  It joins the Walt Disney Concert Hall and REDCAT, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Colburn School to form an arts hub along Grand Avenue.  Lead  Los Angeles Times art critic, Christopher Knight's review "An early look in the Broad museum reveals a show that doesn't quite gel," discusses the debut exhibition.  Blogger read this review and thought that it presented an interesting question, with MOCA, the Geffen Contemporary, the Resnick Contemporary Art Pavilion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the UCLA Hammer Museum of Art, does Los Angeles need another contemporary art museum.  Let us start with collection itself before we answer the question.

Sample of the Broad Collection
Photograph by Iwan Baan
artslant.com

The Broad Museum opens its debut weekend with a 50,000-square-foot exhibition exclusively culled from its deep permanent collection.  Mr. Knight's initial reaction to the premier show is short and sweet, "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."  Blogger would like to point out that with that wide-ranging a collection what criteria do you use to decide what pieces to use in the exhibition.

The curator who gave Mr. Knight a tour of the museum, cheerfully noted ...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 the art pull a visitor through the galleries and calibrate an installation so that objects visually speak to one another. The Broad collection inaugural exhibit began in June.  Mr. Knight made three visits over a short period of time and and noted that the installation "...revealed a work in evolutionary progress, with many changes along the way..."  While the museum advertises the installation as "a sweeping, chronological journey" of the collection.

Broad Museum Interior
blogs.artinfo.com

However Mr. Knight observes, "But, in addition to feeling random (why this artist and not that one?), much of the best has been seen before..."  A reference to two large Broad exhibits at LACMA in 2001 and 2008.  Understandably Mr. Knight might feel a sense of déjà vu.  Despite the feeling of repetition, Mr. Knight notes, "The strongest feature is the collection's depth in the representation of individual artists, especially Pop-related."  The depth of representation of individual artists is the product of Eli and Edythe Broad's approach to collecting-when they commit to acquiring an artist's work, they collect in depth-inspired by Guiseppe and Giovanna Panza de Biuma whose massive postwar American art collection is housed at MOCA.

Eli and Edythe Broad
cpexecutive.com

Not many museum have the resources to acquire work in bulk quantities such as two dozen Jeff Koons sculptures.  The tantalizing thought of several rooms, devoted to a single artist, is an attractive enough of a proposition to make the visitor linger longer.  Among the featured works is Andy Warhol's 1962 Dance Diagram series of 11 paintings properly displayed on the floor, not on the wall.  There are the requisite Roy Lichenstein prints (10) which offer an excellent survey of his sixties breakthrough-mass-media interpretation of historic styles.  Yet, only four Ellsworth Kelly paintings occupy another room.  Those of you who are Ellsworth Kelly fans may blanch at the thought of only a measly four paintings but as Christopher Knight writes, "...their seamless fusion of bold geometric shapes, crisp composition and saturated colors grabs you by the lapels...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..."

Eli Broad with a Jeff Koons sculpture
forbes.com

  The exhibit features five paintings and sculptures by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami bring the collection into the present. The cartoon cheerfulness, albeit, slightly disturbing look at post-atomic Japanese society take on monumental proportions in a new 82-foot mural.  For example, 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."  The mural features massive waves of "storm-tossed sea monsters cavort around a grim mountain of skull-a landscape of elegant, stylishly sophisticated awfulness." Mr. Knight cites writer Pico Iyer's observation on the mural, published in the collection catalog to coincide with the show:

...wartime emperor Hirohito was buried with the Mickey Mouse wristwatch he snagged on a 1977 trip to Disneyland.  Murakami's art unpeels the perpetual violation of innocence that characterizes modern Japan.

In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow
Takashi Murakmi
Photograph by Ellen Burke
artobserved.com

Christopher Knight appears to be quite enchanted by "...the most viscerally gorgeous room is Cy Twombly's, with seven lush paintings and three sculptures."  Cy Twombly is difficult artist to present to non-art audience who tend to filter postwar painting through the "My Child Could Do That" art criticism because his paintings combine drawing and writing.  The point is to liberate them from the established boundaries of presentation.  Cy Twombly's work is, by no means, an array of random scribbles.  They are "...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.  Definitely not art your child can do.  Mr. Knight wistfully hoped the rest of the exhibition would of continued with monograph rooms.

Untitled 1964/84
Cy Twombly
whitney.org

However, instead of the hoped for monograph room, with the exception of rooms dedicated to John Currin and Glenn Ligon, the show lapses into conventional mode. Mr. Knight observes, "Packaged art movements popular in New York in the late 1970s and after are chronicled. Blandness settles in."  For example, a Richard Prince painting and Sherrie Levine's cast-bronze interpretation of Marcel Duchamp's urinal are placed in the same room as Neo-Expressionist work by Julian Schnabel and Eric Fischl.  Graffiti art is represented by the ubiquitous Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring.  Yours truly says ubiquitous because it does seem that every museum or gallery dedicated to art from the eighties to the present seems to be required to feature a work by Basquiat and Haring very much in same way work by Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol are a necessity.  Christopher Knight sums this up as "A choppy, incomplete history...told with too many works juxtaposed in spaces too confined.  Many individual works are fine but together feel jumbled and thin."

Thou Shalt Be a Bit Rude
Keith Haring
haring.com

The proper conservation of the art work is a major concern of Mr. Knight.  Rightly, he is worried about the effect of sun exposure on works on paper, photographs, and painted, which should not be kept in sunlight.  These fragile works are spread out between a first-floor suite of rooms, designed to hold temporary and traveling shows, and an open third-floor space with a dramatic ceiling.  This concern is further enhanced by a 35,000-square-foot web of fixed skylights facing north, flooding the space with flat, cool, filtered light.  A collection of Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills face the skylights.  Mike Kelly's monumental acrylic on paper of nested picture frames, surrounding an idyllic mountain cabin vista.  Barbara Kruger's co-option of graphic design, turning it a into subversive threat.  Jasper John's exquisite White Flag (1960) worries Mr. Knight the most-this ironic symbol of surrender is an oil on newspaper on paper over lithograph.  Museum director Joanne Heyler, who organized the show along with Mr. Broad, assured Mr. Knight that  conservation precautions are being taken and the work will be rotated.  Rightly, Mr. Knight asks, "But why take the risk?  I'd feel better if the paper works were all downstairs shielded from the mischievous sun."

Your Body is a Battleground
Barbara Kruger
designishistory.com

This brings us to the question posed at the top of the post, does Los Angeles need another museum dedicated to contemporary art?  The Broad Museum is no ordinary contemporary art museum, it is a museum dedicated to the private collection of Eli and Edythe Broad. This is something not unique in the history of art patronage.  Historically, painters, sculptors, and architects have relied on their patrons to subsidize their work and lifestyles in exchange for creating work that aggrandize their benefactors.  However, the Broads are more like David Geffen or Bill Gates, contemporary collectors who have the resources to acquire quantities of art.  However, unlike Messrs. Gates and Geffen, the Broads commissioned the New York firm of Diller, Scofidio + Renfro to build a museum for their collection and open it to the public.  Given the Broads's dedication to educational causes, would not endowing the public school arts programs be a better use of the money spent on a monument to the self?

Untitled Film Still #21 (1977)
Cindy Sherman
arthistoryarchive.com

Throughout Christopher Knight's review of the premier Broad Museum exhibition drives home the point that works on display seem like déjà vu.  This may be due, in part, to the fact that artists such as Andy Warhol often made multiples of their work.  This made it possible for different museums to acquire a Warhol, a Lichtenstein, a Haring, so forth and so on.  However, you sometimes get the feeling that if you have seen one, you have seem them all.  Why bother going to a shiny new downtown museum to see the same thing in three neighboring museums? Yours truly understands that Los Angeles civic officials are keen to make Grand Avenue a cultural destination but another museum, dedicated to contemporary art seems superfluous.  Right now it is still too soon to tell if the Broad Museum was a great idea or not.  Be that as it may, the Broad Museum has the potential to showcase some fine examples of contemporary art and perhaps, change the minds of the general public who subscribe to "My kindergartener can do that" school of art criticism.

P.S. Please check out the short video yours truly posted on Sunday September 13 on the Broad Museum.