ART - A Billionaire Collector's Museum

"An art collector with Broad influence opens his own museum" PBS NewsHour 9/18/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Billionaire Eli Broad began his fortune building tract homes in the Detroit suburbs, and over the decades he and his wife also built an impressive art collection.  Now the brand new Broad Museum is set to open in Los Angeles, part of his larger effort to make the city into an arts mecca.  Jeffrey Brown reports.

HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour):  Los Angeles’ cultural scene is about to get a big new showcase for contemporary art.  A new museum opens this weekend featuring the work of major artists from the past six decades, all from the private collection of a longtime arts patron.

Jeffrey Brown takes us there for a preview.

JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour):  Billionaire art collector Eli Broad still remembers how he managed to acquire this early painting by modern master Roy Lichtenstein.

ELI BROAD, Philanthropist:  A Parisian collector wanted a lot of money for it.  I wasn’t going to pay that.  So what I did is, I wrote a check for X-million dollars and said, you could take the check, send me the art, or tear it up.

JEFFREY BROWN:  Really?

ELI BROAD:  And we ended up with the art.

JEFFREY BROWN:  Not something that most of us can do, but Eli Broad can and has for more than four decades.  The results can now be seen in the brand-new $140 million Broad Museum in Los Angeles.

Designed by the firm of Diller Scofidio and Renfro, it features an outer honeycomb veil that allows natural light to filter in, a floor for storage of art works that visitors can peer into, and 30 galleries filled with big names in modern and contemporary art, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Kara Walker, Jeff Koons, and many others, including Jasper Johns.