LOS ANGELES — When he arrived in Los Angeles more than 50 years ago, Eli Broad once said, he found himself in a city without a cultural center. So the billionaire arts patron decided to build one.
On Sept. 20 that effort took a major step forward with the opening of The Broad, a shining, pop-art-styled museum holding 2,000 works by arguably every important contemporary artist of the past 60 years.
The $140 million project featuring 50,000 square feet of exhibition space is the most recent accomplishment in Broad’s ongoing effort to remake a once seedy section of downtown Los Angeles into the cultural arts center he has long envisioned.
But more than that, says Joanne Heyler, a veteran curator and the new museum’s director, The Broad stands to remake Los Angeles into the nation’s contemporary art capital.
“Los Angeles is now a place, a city, where if you’re serious about collecting contemporary art, if you’re serious about understanding contemporary art, you cannot not come here,” she said as she led a recent tour through the museum.
The three-story building itself is almost as much a pop-art creation as the numerous works by Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Chris Burden and scores of others that it contains.
Its unusual appearance features a white, honeycombed “veil” made of fiberglass-reinforced concrete. It’s a wrapping that envelops the building from its roof to the ground.
The museum itself sits directly across the street from LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art, of which Broad was the founding director when it opened in 1979. It is next door to the Walt Disney Concert Hall, which opened in 2003 after a $250 million fundraising effort spearheaded by Broad, who made a fortune in real estate and investments before turning his attention to the arts and philanthropy.
The museum has no admission desk in the lobby because there is no admission fee.
Instead, the lobby resembles an Apple store, with museum “associates” armed with smartphones wandering the floor, checking visitors in and directing them to the nearly two dozen galleries.
Although admission is free, reservations are recommended so visitors can get in at the times they prefer.
With works arranged chronologically, first-time visitors are advised to take an escalator to the third floor, where among the first things they’ll see is Jeff Koons’ brilliantly colorful “Tulips” sculpture.
