As celebrities walked down the red carpet in Hollywood under sweltering September heat for Emmy awards, downtown Los Angeles had its own celebration for an entirely different art-related occasion – the opening of its latest contemporary art museum. The Broad is the new L.A. art destination, hosting a rich collection of contemporary art assembled by philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad over more than 40 years. Devised by architectural superstars Diller Scofidio + Renfro – just as its neighboring, Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall – the three-story museum features 50,000 square feet of exhibition space on two floors – taken over for its inaugural exhibition by 250 artworks among which can be found the work of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, John Baldessari, Mark Bradford, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger and Kara Walker, that best represent the Broad collection’s view of a half century of contemporary art.
The exhibition begins with classic 1960s works by Andy Warhol, as well as a luminous gallery of Cy Twombly painting and sculpture, and will track the Broad collection’s strengths through the decades. The installation continues in the first-floor galleries, bringing the journey through contemporary art to the present with some of the most recent acquisitions and artworks such as Yayoi Kusama’s immersive Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away and a colorful, epic 82-foot-long painting by Takashi Murakami, a meditation on the recovery of Japan from the catastrophic 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. Concentrated installations of art from New York’s East Village and Soho scenes of the 1980s reflect the Broads’ passionate immersion in that era as collectors. Highlights from the collection’s incomparable paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat are prominently featured, as are strong representations by Cindy Sherman, drawn from The Broad’s largest collection in the world of her works; Sherrie Levine, including Fountain (Buddha), 1996, her appropriated version in cast bronze of the porcelain urinal that Marcel Duchamp famously and notoriously exhibited in 1917 as Fountain; Barbara Kruger’s iconic Untitled (Your body is a battleground) from 1989; as well as works by Jack Goldstein and others.
Works from the 1980s and 1990s highlight the Broads’ intensive and sustained engagement with artworks containing tough social and political content, found in the work of artists like David Wojnarowicz, Cady Noland, Kara Walker, Anselm Kiefer and Mike Kelley. The collection’s abiding interest in sometimes biting, confrontational imagery critical of some of the most traumatic passages and challenging issues in American and European modern history plays a major role in the installation. Anselm Kiefer’s masterwork Deutschlands Geisteshelden, addressing the recovery of Germany from the ravages of World War II, is shown in relationship with German artist Joseph Beuys’ multiples, selected from the Broad’s 570-work Beuys multiples collection, the most comprehensive set of these key works in the Western U.S. “As vast as the inaugural installation is, very few galleries show the full depth of our holdings in the work of any given artist,” said Heyler. “This gives the public just a hint at the totality of the collection—and a reason to come back many times to see fresh rotations, new acquisitions and more in-depth special exhibitions.”
The Blogazine – Images courtesy of the Broad
