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Collecting power: Eli Broad and the re-making of art in Los Angeles

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Collecting power: Eli Broad and the re-making of art in Los Angeles

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Collecting Power:
Eli Broad and the Re-making of Art in Los Angeles
by
Jonas Short

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(CURATORIAL PRACTICES AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE)

May 2023

Copyright 2023 Jonas Short

ii

“Inheritance is the soundest way of acquiring a collection. For a collector’s attitude toward his
possessions stems from an owners feeling of responsibility toward his property. Thus, it is in
the highest sense, the attitude of an heir, and the most distinguished trait of a collection
will always be its transmissibility”
-Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting,” 1931

“Is, in other words, the collector's deepest enchantment actually the liberating magic of
disenchantment, or is it a fascination that merely renders stupid and inert both
object and collector?”
-Jennifer Holt, “Habent Sua Fata Libelli: The Collector as Augur,” 2012

iii

For G.T.,
And for all those as fascinated by institutions
as the art they display.

iv
Acknowledgements
This endeavor would not have been possible without the support and guidance of my
thesis chair, Dr. Jenny Lin, or committee members Dr. Suzanne Hudson and Dr. Lisa Pon. I am
truly grateful for their encouragement, and their many thoughtful suggestions throughout the
writing and editing process. I would also like to extend my sincere thanks to the USC Roski
community, without whom this project would not have been the same. Your unwavering support
for my academic, professional, and personal growth has been deeply appreciated.
I firmly believe that it takes the proverbial village not only for a child to be raised, but for
a person to succeed in any endeavor. I would therefore like to thank not just my parents, David
and Corinna Short, but my grandmother Betty Short, my “Aunt” and “Uncle” Nancy and Keith
Morgan, and my late grandmother, Gertrude Thiel. Special thanks should also be extended to the
College of Wooster community that helped shape me into the scholar and person I am today, and
who helped me formulate what would eventually be the groundwork for my thesis.
I would be remiss if I did not also acknowledge the many friends who are as dear to me
as family. You know who you are, and I only hope you know how much of a difference your
support has made. Finally, I want to express my sincerest gratitude to Hannah Sullivan. She has
been my love and my rock for half a decade, and neither this thesis nor my life would be the
same if not for her support of all my endeavors.

v
Table Of Contents

Epigraph..........................................................................................................................................ii

Dedication ..................................................................................................................................... iii

Acknowledgements.........................................................................................................................iv

Abstract...........................................................................................................................................vi

Introduction.....................................................................................................................................1
Theory and Literature..........................................................................................................7

Chapter 1: Eli Before The Broad...................................................................................................14
Early Life and Collecting..................................................................................................14
Eli Broad and MOCA’s Founding.....................................................................................20
Maintaining a Museum......................................................................................................25

Chapter 2: The Making of a Single Collector Museum ...............................................................30
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and
The Broad Contemporary Art Museum............................................................................ 30
Eli Broad’s Walt Disney Concert Hall………………………………….....……....….....39
Eli Broad’s Other Grand Avenue Projects.........................................................................43
The Broad Today...............................................................................................................45

Conclusion.....................................................................................................................................53
The Broad as Cultural Site.................................................................................................53
The Future of Collectors in Museums...............................................................................56
Returning to Detroit ..........................................................................................................57

Bibliography .................................................................................................................................59

vi
Abstract
Collecting Power: Eli Broad and the Re-making of Art in Los Angeles explores how the
views, tastes, and epistemologies of a collector can impact how knowledge about art is recorded,
understood, and transmitted when the private collection meets the public-facing museum. This
thesis disentangles how the legacy of a private collector can affect public museums, whether
through the donation of a collection, or in the case of The Broad, the establishment of a single-
collector museum. I assert that The Broad, rather than merely being a “vanity museum,” is
emblematic of how the beliefs of an individual collector are manifested in the institutions they
support, as well as the immense influence individuals can have over a city’s cultural landscape.
This thesis is demonstrated via case studies including Eli Broad’s involvement with The
Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), The Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) at The
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and The Broad.

1
"Only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight.
Only in extinction is the collector comprehended”
-Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting,” 1931
1

Introduction
Oftentimes one’s studies and research become inseparable from one’s pastimes.
Anthropologists find themselves analyzing family barbeques; geologists end up studying the
coastlines they retire to on hot summer days; and those interested in the history and theory of art
often find their vacations built around trips to far-flung museums and galleries. On one such
sojourn in early 2019, I found myself visiting the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA). Amid the
encyclopedic collection housed in that Classical repository of fine arts, in a small gallery behind
Diego Rivera’s famous mural cycle, was a special exhibition particularly revealing of the
problematics of the modern museum.
The DIA’s Extraordinary Eye, Extraordinary Gift: The Legacy of Margaret Herz Demant
exhibited not just the works recently bequeathed to a public institution by a private collector, but
inadvertently displayed the complicated relationship of collectors and institutions in the 21
st

century. In displaying the collection of someone who created “conscious juxtapositions of
western and non-western objects,” the DIA waded into troubled waters exemplified by the
Museum of Modern Art’s (MOMA) now highly criticized exhibition, “Primitivism” in 20
th

Century Art.
2
In that 1984 exhibition, MOMA curators William Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe

1
Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting,” Illuminations,
edited by Hannah Arendt and translated by Harry Zohn, pp. 59-67, (New York: Schocken Books, 1969).
2
“Extraordinary Eye, Extraordinary Gift: The Legacy of Margaret Herz Demant (January 27 –
May 19, 2019),” Exhibitions, The Detroit Institute of Arts, Accessed 7 September 2022; For more on the MOMA
exhibition, see Adam Jasper, “No Drums or Spears,” in Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 67/68 (2016/2017): 299-
315 and Thomas McEvilley, “Doctor Lawyer Indian Chief: ‘Primitivism' in 20th Century Art" at the Museum of
Modern Art in 1984,” Artforum (Nov. 1984): 54-61.

2
uncritically presented works by modern artists such as Picasso and Giacometti alongside
important artifacts from past and present indigenous societies in places as disparate as Africa,
Canada, and Oceana. Primitivism has been criticized for failing to meaningfully problematize
“primitivism” as an artistic style, instead reproducing the history of colonial exploitation and
erasure that initially enabled Euro-American artists to draw upon art and artifacts created by non-
Western “others” in the first place. Because of the exhibition’s fundamental failing to adequately
address the tension inherent in the artistic products of colonialism, “Primitivism” in 20
th
Century
Art has become a common case in the study of both art and ethnographic exhibitions.
While elements of DIA’s Extraordinary Eye, Extraordinary Gift attempted to
problematize the outmoded comparison of modernism and “primitive art,” the form of this
single-collector exhibition required that the museum leave colonial African art in largely
uncritical conversation with the art of Pablo Picasso, Jean Dubuffet, André Breton, and other
modern European artists, following the same display conventions as those in the late donor’s
living space.
3
Because the exhibition was beholden to the donor’s vision, it reproduced the
inequality and colonial relationship of the 1984 MOMA exhibition despite what seemed to be
good faith attempts by curators to avoid the problem through thoughtful texts and installation.
Regardless, the uneven juxtaposition of African and Western works in the exhibition highlighted
the contradiction between scholarly imperatives to educate an institution’s publics, and an
institution’s obligations and debts to collectors turned donors who have a “discerning eye and
discriminating taste.”
4

3
“Detroit Institute of Arts Celebrates the ‘Extraordinary Eye’ and ‘Extraordinary Gift’ of Margaret
Herz Demant in New Exhibition.” Blog, The Detroit Institute of Arts. Accessed 7 September 2022.; “Extraordinary
Eye, Extraordinary Gift: The Legacy of Margaret Herz Demant (January 27 –
May 19, 2019),” Exhibitions.
4
“Extraordinary Eye, Extraordinary Gift: The Legacy of Margaret Herz Demant (January 27 –
May 19, 2019),” Exhibitions.

3
The DIA’s 2019 temporary exhibition illustrates the double bind museum professionals
come up against when encountering the legacy of the private collector in the public institution.
By honoring a donor with an exhibition of their collection—as many institutions have and
continue to do—the museum demonstrated to the public and potential donors that their
engagement and contributions were valued. Therefore, omitting certain objects or classes of
objects, interspersing other donations or purchases, or even simply contextualizing a problematic
visual has the potential to appear as a condemnation of a collector. However, the codes of
standards and ethics for museums laid out by organizations like the American Alliance of
Museums typically implore member institutions and individuals to “be a good neighbor” to their
publics and communities while “legally, ethically, and effectively” managing and deploying
collections to preserve and educate about “the world’s natural and cultural common wealth.”
This implies that one must not merely recreate or preserve the vision of the collector, but
critically engage with it—and its possible flaws—in order to responsibly display donated
objects.
5
What then should scholars and museum professionals do? And if these problems arise
in a single exhibition, how should we approach the collections of single collector museums? It is
obvious to many that museums such as Philadelphia’s Gardner are based on the accumulations of
a single founder, but is this equally apparent in single collector museums that more closely
emulate the form of the modern museum? Scholars have worked for nearly three decades to
unravel the notion that museums are objective arbiters of history, but that is still often the
viewpoint of publics who turn to museums of art seeking to enrich their or their family’s

5
“AAM Code of Ethics for Museums,” and “Core Standards for Museums,” Ethics, Standards, and Professional
Practices, AAM, Accessed 7 March 2023, and “Diversity, Equity To Become Required for Museum Accreditation,
Standards,” AAM, 17 October 2022, Accessed 7 March 2023.

4
understanding of the world.
6
How might such publics be inadvertently misinformed by a
collector’s incomplete or skewed ideas as manifested in their donated collection?
Surely, it would be hard to argue that a collector “purposefully purchasing art to fill in
gaps within the [Detroit Institute of Arts’] various departments,” and subsequently donating that
collection is anything but a net good for a civically backed museum that offers free admission.
Yet in this beneficence more questions are generated. How was a collector to know what gaps
exist in a museum’s holdings if they are a nonexpert—particularly in an era before many
museums published publicly accessible, online collection catalogues? Does this imply that
curators at the DIA, as anecdotes from many museum professionals across the country suggest,
were spending time educating and currying favor with collectors in addition to serving their
institution’s publics? What does this say about the influence private collectors have in public
museums today, beyond serving as trustees or board members? As I wandered through the small
gallery, I made mention of the MOMA exhibition to my companions, but as I reflected on the
experience, I came to realize that the DIA exhibition revealed more questions about museums
and cultures of collecting today, than answers about any theories of “primitivism” in art.
The DIA’s Extraordinary Eye, Extraordinary Gift has long since been removed and
replaced with other temporary exhibitions from the permanent collection, leaving us to pick apart
memories and years old press kits to try and make sense of it. However, the questions the

6
For more on how public interact with institutions, and particularly how individuals view institutions as arbiters of
truth, history and/or high culture see Michael Baxandall, “Exhibiting Intention: Some Preconditions on the Visual
Display of Culturally Purposeful Objects” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed.
Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, pp. 33-41, (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), Carol
Duncan, “Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum
Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, pp. 88-103, (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1991), Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture, (Cambridge:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1995), Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New History in an Old
Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), and
Andrea Fraser, “From the Critique of Institutions to Institutions of Critique,” Artforum 44, no. 1 (September 2005):
100-106.

5
exhibition raised for me linger on in institutions throughout the country. Single collector
museums make acutely visible the dilemmas which arise when the interests, opinions, and
ideologies of private collectors come into contact with museums via donated collections. The
ideas of one individual can profoundly impact public understandings of art and the work of
scholars within the institution when that individual’s buying habits—their investments, interests,
omissions, and ideas of what is or isn’t historically important—inform the core of the
institution’s collection. This becomes especially clear in institutions whose founding collector
has recently died or otherwise relinquished influence over their museum.
The late developer, philanthropist, and art collector Eli Broad (1933-2021) and his
eponymous Los Angeles museum provide excellent examples of how one individual can deeply
impact a city’s vision of art, and of itself. The legacy of Eli Broad, as well of that of his spouse
Edythe Broad (b.1936), remains an active presence in their namesake museum on Grand Avenue.
Through the works and artists included in and omitted from the collection, The Broad highlights
Eli’s attempts to reform the city’s visual culture via the importation of existing definitions of
artistic, aesthetic, and historical value. In this thesis, I will demonstrate how Eli Broad attempted
to remake Los Angeles’ cultural landscape into something resembling existing models from
elsewhere, such as in New York City, London, or Paris, eschewing the city’s existing culture and
needs in the process. By critically examining this case study, my thesis will illustrate the power
of private collectors in public museums and question how museums and scholars can both
acknowledge a legacy while responsibly educating a museum’s publics about our shared cultural
patrimony.
In the following thesis, one individual is noticeably absent. Edythe Broad has been
variously described as the impetus behind the couple’s art collection, with even her late husband

6
acknowledging her as having a “good eye” and guiding many of their purchases. However, she
has been largely omitted from all official and journalistic discussions of The Broad, Eli’s cultural
projects, and the private collection that seems to lie at the root of it all. Edythe is referenced only
in passing in this thesis, but deserves thorough study as a patron and collector in her own right. I
sincerely hope that such research occurs during Edythe Broad’s lifetime as her thoughts and
experiences would illuminate not only her role in The Broad, but more importantly, the roles of
gender, wealth, and power in determining a personal collection-driven museum.
My thesis consciously avoids the term “vanity museum.” Though the term has
increasingly come into vogue during the last decade, I find it largely unhelpful in the present
context. If one is to consider groundbreaking works of Museology such as Carol Duncan’s “Art
Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship”—a work that has deeply informed my scholarship
nearly from the beginning—museums are by their nature vain displays of national pride.
Whether a museum is the product of a civic committee’s definition of art and culture, or a single
donor’s, it seems rather unimportant to distinguish with a morally-coded term such as “vanity
museum.” In my own thesis, I instead refer to The Broad as a “single collector” museum because
I believe the implicit judgement that may be read into “vanity museum” is unhelpful here.
Likewise, I refer to and study The Broad as a “public museum” or a “public-facing
museum” despite it being privately administered.
7
In contrast to many other nations, the United
States has very few museums funded and administered by any level of government. While the
federally administered Smithsonian museums are free, many other institutions across the country

7
My use of “public” to describe The Broad is not without precedent, not only is it largely representative of
vernacular use and understanding of “public” museums, but the term public has been used to describe public facing
museums that are privately held and operated by scholars such. Georgina S. Walker in her The Private Collector’s
Museum: Public Good Versus Private Gain, (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), pp. 7.

7
such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art are run partly with government control, and partly as private entities, with
funding coming from any number of sources. I therefore take the liberty of referring to The
Broad as a “public” or “public-facing museum” because, in spite of its private ownership and
administration, the Grand Avenue museum is highly accessible, free, and open to the public.
The remainder of this introduction considers existing literature on collecting and the single-
collector museum, as well as theories relevant to my analysis of Eli Broad’s collecting and The
Broad. In Chapter One, I examine Eli’s biography, philanthropy, and collecting from his and
Edythe’s first purchases through their involvement with the founding—and bailout—of the
Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). Chapter Two then considers Eli’s involvement with the
Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) project at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
(LACMA) as well as his other projects in Los Angeles, particularly along Grand Avenue. This
thesis’ final chapter finally pivots to interrogate the legacy of Eli in Los Angeles’ cultural
landscape, as well as how institutions and scholars can thoughtfully work with such legacies in
service of their publics.
Theory and Literature
The following paragraphs briefly survey 20
th
and 21
st
-century writings on private
collectors and collecting, with a focus on writings of the last decade, such as Erin Thompson’s
Possession (2016) and Georgina Walker’s The Private Collector’s Museum (2019). However, in
order to understand the writings and theories which have shaped scholarship on collecting,
collectors, and their relationship to museums, I begin with the early 20
th
-century writings of
Walter Benjamin.

8
In Benjamin’s well-known essay “Unpacking my Library: A Talk About Book
Collecting,” the German scholar self-reflexively examines the collector’s major drives or
compulsions.
8
Benjamin’s model of the collector assumes omnipotent visions of history and
futurity through the collection and activation of objects, but this activation does not necessarily
imply the use of a collected object (books, in the case of Benjamin’s essay) for its originally
designed purpose.
9
Rather, he proposes that the collector’s enjoyment comes from the stories and
myths that are embodied by, or constructed around, the collected object. In particular, Benjamin
recounted that, “One of the finest memories of a collector is the moment when he rescued a book
to which he might never have given a thought, much less a wishful look, because he found it
lonely and abandoned on the market place and brought it to give it its freedom.”
10
Benjamin
proposes that a collection’s meanings, significances, and myths are generated by the individual
who amasses it and in turn the collection generates new meanings for the collector and that in
public or academic museums this sort of illusive magic is lost.
11

Benjamin’s “Edward Fuchs: Collector and Historian” also discusses the figure of the
private collector and their motivations, but with the distance provided by writing about another’s
habits, the author’s relationship to Hegelian understandings of historical progression, and more
importantly, to Marx’s idea of the commodity fetish are highlighted.
12
In this essay, Benjamin
reinforces his theory that collectors of art (re)invent the histories of their collection as they
“integrate their [the object’s] pre- as well as post-history; and it is their post-history which
illuminates their pre-history as a continuous process of change.”
13
This continual process of

8
Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library.”
9
Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” 60- 61, and 62.
10
Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,”64.
11
Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” 67.
12
Benjamin, Walter. “Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian.” New German Critique 5, no. 5 (1975): 27–58.
13
Benjamin, “Edward Fuchs,” 28.

9
uncovering histories and imagining futures collapses the past and present into newly invented
myths as the artist’s intent is superseded by the collector’s imagination and their own
epistemologies.
14
In Benjamin’s subtle indictment of his subject—and himself by extension—we
see how Fuch’s activism and labors as a socialist organizer were undermined by his own desire
to possess works of satire, pornography, and genre despite having created the “only existing
archive” of these materials.
15

Though formative for the study of collectors, Benjamin’s writings are not so sacrosanct
as to be beyond critique. Writing in 1988, Literary scholar Ackbar Abbas criticized Benjamin’s
collector as “emblematic of the opposition between enlightenment and myth, that is, myth as a
form of reversion to the past that does violence to modern life,” because the collector is “rather
the traumatized, privatized, and impotent individual, the etui man of the interior. Benjamin’s
reflections on the fate of modern experience are closely related to the transformation [emphasis
original] of this poor figure.”
16
Film and Media Studies professor Jennifer Holt later questioned
how Benjamin at once identified collecting as a “as a sign of approaching death” among
practitioners and communities while idolizing the remove from established histories he felt that
he and other collectors were privileged to.
17
Holt identifies the commodity fetish in Benjamin’s
analysis of the collector, stating that “in emphasizing the collector's magic, as well as
susceptibility to magic, Benjamin is arguing on behalf of the persistence of a petrified, lifeless
enchantment of the sort that we typically understand to be engendered by commodity fetish.”
18

14
Benjamin, “Edward Fuchs,” 28.
15
Benjamin, “Edward Fuchs,” 27 and 36-40.
16
Ackbar Abbas, “Walter Benjamin's Collector: The Fate of Modern Experience.” New Literary History 20, No. 1
(Autumn 1988), 217-237, esp. 218 and 226
17
Holt, Jennifer. “Habent Sua Fata Libelli: The Collector as Augur.” New German Critique 117, Special Issue for
Anson Reinbach (2012): 189-205.
18
Abbas, “Walter Benjamin’s Collector,” 220 and Holt, “Habent Sua Fata Libelli,” 190.

10
Holt proposes that collected objects can become multi-vocal symbols of the accumulated
experience of their makers, viewers, and collectors rather than merely malleable objects to
launch flights of fancy for Benjamin’s magically-imbued collector.
19
Much like the collectors of
Holt and Benjamin, Eli Broad’s collection was surrounded by an irrational cloud of myth and
passion that left the objects in his collection simultaneously lifeless and priceless due to the
stories of discovery, acquisition, and stewardship that surrounded them.
Published in 2016, Erin Thompson’s Possession: The Curious History of Private
Collectors from Antiquity to the Present signaled a renewed scholarly and popular interest in
collectors, collections, and museums in the 21
st
-century. The monograph is a detailed history of
collecting in the Western world and treats the accumulation of material culture as a highly
individualistic but irrefutably political phenomenon imbued with the collector’s visions of the
world, and their place and powers within that world. Though much of Thompsons’s work
focuses on the collection, looting, fabrication, and restoration of antiquities, her conclusions
about why collectors collect and share artwork with publics have informed my work on Eli
Broad.
The author analyzes collecting as a culturally conditioned phenomenon tied to the
accretion and protection of money, prestige, power, and perceived intellect.
20
Furthermore, she
concludes that modern collectors are motivated by both the mythology of objects and the idea
that a collector’s physical touch or viewership activates the object and allows the collector to

19
Holt, “Habent Sua Fata Libelli;” For a slight counterpoint to Holt, see, Gyorgy Markus, “Walter Benjamin or: The
Commodity as Phantasmagoria,” New German Critique, no. 83, Special Issue on Walter Benjamin (Spring -
Summer, 2001): 3-42. Markus argued that Benjamin’s collector does not fetishize the artwork as commodity simply
because artworks are not valued as commodities in Marx’s terms, but concedes that under capitalist systems they are
treated as such because of their highly subjective and irrational market price.
20
Erin Thompson, Possession: The Curious History of Private Collectors from Antiquity to the Present, (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 6, 21, 112.

11
intuit an understanding of the object, its history, and its creator.
21
Of particular importance to this
thesis is Thompson’s consideration of a titan of Los Angeles art and industry that proceeded Eli
broad—John Paul Getty. In her discussions of Getty, Thompson draws from the collector’s
published writings on business and educating “twentieth-century barbarians” to conclude that
Getty viewed creating a museum an undertaking both of beneficence and as a philanthropic
business venture.
22
Thompson’s Possession, and her assessment of why modern collectors both
amass and share art, influence my own analysis of Eli Broad’s “venture philanthropy” and his
namesake museum on Grand Avenue.
23

Following the publication of Thompson’s historical work, other publications like
Georgina S. Walker’s 2019 The Private Collector’s Museum: Public Good Versus Private Gain
have pivoted to examine private collectors in the modern world.
24
Beginning with house
museums and single collector museums established at the dawn of the 20
th
-century and
concluding with Los Angeles’ Broad, Walker’s monograph illuminates how contemporary
“Entrepreneurs [turned collectors] such as American art collector and philanthropist Eli Broad,
are no longer satisfied with the traditional and passive form of philanthropy,” and seeks to
demonstrate what that means for the modern museum.
25
Crucially, Walker dedicates the final
chapter of her monograph to examining The Broad and its benefactor, ultimately concluding that

21
Thompson, 104-105.
22
Thompson, 115-118 and John Paul Getty, As I See It, (Englewood Cliffs and London: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1976).
23
Naomi Schaefer Riley, “The Weekend Interview with Eli Broad: 'We're In the Venture Philanthropy Business,'”
The Wall Street Journal, 29 August 2011: A 11 and “SunAmerica Chairman Eli Broad Announces New Role,” PR
Newswire, 14 September 2000.
24
Similarly, Nizan Shaked’s recent Museums and Wealth: The Politics of Contemporary Art Collections (London:
Bloomsbury, 2022) in which the Los Angeles based researcher interrogates how private collectors use the reputation
of public institutions as well as positions within them, to burnish their collections’ reputations in ways that (re)create
systems of institutional inequity and contribute to a detrimental dependence on ill-gotten private wealth among the
public institutions of the United States, a topic I briefly reference in discussions of Eli Broad’s relationship to
MOCA.
25
Walker, 9-10.

12
Eli Broad’s founding of his own institution—rather than donating to an established museum—
was influenced his own vanity, a need for curatorial control, and a desire to have his collection
works on view as often as possible.
26
Other authors—and Broad himself—have touched on the
ideas proposed by Walker, but I contest her first point, arguing that the establishment of The
Broad should be seen as part of a larger effort by the late “venture philanthropist” to refashion
the city’s culture and urban landscape in a non-local manner reminiscent of more recognized
artistic hubs in Europe and the Eastern United States.
27

Finally, writings on Los Angeles have informed my analysis as someone not born into or
raised in the city’s cultural landscape. Through popular media, the city is portrayed as a
beautifully ugly metropolis where dreams are fulfilled and dashed in equal measure, a city of
gleaming stars and light pollution, of sand and smog—the worst version of heaven, as many have
quipped. But no writings or popular imaginings of Los Angeles have influenced this thesis more
than those of Mike Davis and Eve Babitz. The former’s City of Quartz attempts to chart the
development of Los Angeles during the 20
th
-century under a succession of competing interests,
organizations, and power brokers. Especially interesting for my thesis is Davis’ discussion of the
mid-late 20
th
century competition between the Westside and Downtown for supremacy of culture
and commerce.
28
Babitz’s essay “Slow Days” has a much deeper resonance with the themes and
spirit of my thesis, if not its specific content.
29
In her piece, Babitz muses on the frequent
criticisms of Los Angeles and it’s cultural sphere in a conscious acknowledgement of the city’s
critics that unapologetically accepts the author’s love for Los Angeles as a “gigantic, sprawling,

26
Walker, 217.
27
Riley, A 11.
28
Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, (New York: Vintage Books/Random House,
Inc., 1992), 74-76.
29
Eve Babitz, “Slow Days” in Slow Days, Fast Company, pp. 7-9, (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1977).

13
ongoing studio,” where “its hard to tell if you’re dealing with real true illusion or false one.”
30

Though “Slow Days” is quite brief, Babitz’s embrace of what many have deemed to be Los
Angeles’ flaws has driven me to question Eli Broad’s determination to remake the city’s cultural
landscape in the model of New York, London, or Paris.
Though their collective works span more than a century, authors such as Benjamin, Holt,
and Thompson allow us to not only understand the history of collecting, but collecting’s very
real implications for the generation and preservation of cultural histories. By studying why and
how private collections are formed and how they then in-turn become accessible to an
institution’s publics, it becomes clear that the collector is not a mute accumulator of material
culture, and that the museum’s formation or acquisition of such a collection does not remove the
collector’s imprint from the collection. Rather, the scholars and theorists this thesis draws upon
empower one to consider how collectors influence public perceptions of art and culture during
and after their lifetime through the institutions they support and the art they collect. By drawing
upon scholarship on collectors and museums, I intend to demonstrate that Eli Broad’s
involvement in MOCA, LACMA’s BCAM, Grand Avenue, and his namesake museum departs
from traditional understandings of private collectors and their museums, but instead represents a
concerted effort to remake Los Angeles’ cultural landscape.

30
Babitz, 8.

14
Chapter One: Eli before The Broad
Early Life and Collecting
Only a few sources exist concerning the beginning of Eli and Edythe Broad’s art
collection, and almost all of those are either journalistic accounts based upon interviews with the
couple, or were directly edited by them. From version to version, the narrative remains largely
the same save for an occasional date shifting or other such small details, suggesting the
information we have is as reliable as any other personal recollection. Furthermore, these
accounts demonstrate that Eli and Edythe’s pattern of collecting was not merely motivated by
possible financial rewards, but by a genuine interest in art, history, and culture. The following
paragraphs offer one of the first critical retellings of the Broad’s collecting patterns up through
the early 2000s, analyzing what the couple’s early patterns of collecting, and their statements
about it, can reveal about the function of their philanthropy and The Broad.
Eli was born in 1933 to Lithuanian-Jewish immigrants living in the Bronx, and raised in
Detroit where he met his future wife Edythe—herself the child of Canadian immigrants.
31
The
couple began collecting individually as adolescents with Eli amassing a large number of postage
stamps which he eventually bought and sold by catalogue, while Edythe became infatuated with
art and collected poster prints.
32
Edythe would later be credited by her husband as being the
instigator of their collection because, in his words, of her “good eye” and interest in art.
33
In
1957, Eli co-founded Kaufman & Broad Home Corporation (since re-organized as KB Home),

31
Georgina S. Walker, “The New Museum and its Creator’s Grand Plan: The Broad, Los Angeles, USA (2015)” in
The Private Collector’s Museum: Public Good Versus Private Gain (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), pp.
209-228, here 210.
210; Barron and Zelevansky, 10.
32
Barron and Zelevansky, 10.
33
Finkel, and Nicholson, 20.

15
but within a decade had moved most operations from Michigan to the rapidly growing Los
Angeles area.
34
In California, Eli’s company specialized in building at breakneck speed—some
homes were move-in ready in 45 days—and selling carefully staged visions of suburban life,
complete with implied hobbies for imagined children.
35
In 1969, Kaufman & Broad began
financing mortgages internally rather than relying on other lenders, a move that enabled Eli’s
corporation to buy the Sun Life Insurance Company of America and turn it into the retirement
savings giant SunAmerica, an entity worth $18 billion at the time it was sold off in 1998.
36
Two
years later Eli began to shift his focus from business to “venture philanthropy” on behalf of
himself, Edythe, and their Broad Art Foundation.
37

The Broads began collecting art around 1972, when they purchased Vincent van Gogh’s
Cabanes à Saintes-Maries (1888)—a small, unassuming, but well executed ink and graphite
drawing on paper.
38
This work was sold only a few years after its acquisition. The sale of the van
Gogh launched one of the central mythologies of the Broad collection and Eli’s views on art: that
he believed art should be readily seen. In multiple interviews, Eli stated that the van Gogh
drawing was sold because its fragility required it only be displayed part of the time, laying in
storage “for six months out of the year to keep it from fading.”
39
Later in life, this aversion to
works being in storage would be cited by Broad as one of the primary reasons for not donating
works to LACMA ahead of the BCAM’s opening, and would even serve as inspiration for Diller

34
Walker, 210.
35
Newbury, 196 and 199.
36
Walker, 210 and Newbury 198.
37
Riley, A 11, and “SunAmerica Chairman Eli Broad Announces New Role,” PR Newswire, 14 September 2000.
38
Barron and Zelevansky, 13; “Vincent Van Gogh: Two Cottages at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer,” Collection Online,
The Morgan Library and Museum, Accessed 5 October 2022.
39
Barron and Zelevansky, 15; Broad, 148-149

16
Scofidio + Renfro’s design of the Broad.
40
The Broads’ van Gogh was allegedly also sold
because Broad found the image to be unchallenging and dull with time.
41

The couple’s collection began to slowly grow through the 1970s and ’80s, primarily with
advice from Eli’s associates, Edythe, and an increasing number of contacts in the art world. Later
in life, the Broads recalled being interested in art but not knowing where to start, instead relying
on the knowledge of others and chance visits to galleries, museums, and studios in New York
City and Los Angeles.
42
Eli admitted at various points to not understanding the work of many of
the artists he eventually collected—including Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, and Frank Stella—
explaining it as akin to Robert Hughes’ “Shock of the New.”
43
Instead, the developer turned
collector described only coming to artists like Warhol through major exhibitions and the advice
of other collectors such as Taft Schreiber.
44
This gradual acceptance of unfamiliar artists and
styles may shed light on one of the frequent criticisms of The Broad’s collection: that the
museum’s holdings are disjointed representations of market forces.
45
Was Eli and Edythe
Broad’s growing collection a representation of their tastes, or of the art market in the 1980s and
1990s when most of their pieces were acquired? I argue that in the case of Eli and Edythe’s
collection—and likely many others—collecting is not driven merely by market forces or the
passions of Benjamin’s collector. Rather, the Broads’ collecting practices were guided by a
market that was driven by the desires of collectors like Broad—desires that were themselves

40
Broad, 154-155; Knight “Change of heart, change of fortune: Eli Broad's decision to withdraw his donation has
serious implications for LACMA's future,” The Los Angeles Times, 11 January 2008; Russell, James S. “Mega
Patron: Philanthropist Eli Broad Gives big But Expects Control” Architectural Record 203, No. 5 (May 2015).
41
Eli Broad, “The Unreasonableness of Art and Artists,” In The Art of Being Unreasonable: Lessons in
Unconventional Thinking, (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2012), 147-155, here 148-149.
42
Nicholson, 20; Barron and Zelevansky, 12 and 17.
43
Broad, 148-149; Nicholson, 20; Finkel.
44
Barron and Zelevansky, 12-14; Nicholson, 20;
45
Walker, 212; Philip Kennicott, “The problem with The Broad is the collection itself,” The Washington Post, 13
September 2015; Christopher Knight, “Eli Broad's endgame for MOCA: The billionaire isn't taking over the
museum, but he can use his sway there to burnish his collection,” The Los Angeles Times, 18 September 2012.

17
derived from what institutions and markets suggested were culturally, artistically, or historically
important works and artists. This cycle of purchase, display, and sale ultimately left The Broad
and the city of Los Angeles with a limited collection that emphasized the work of well known,
New York-based artists over less well known and equally talented L.A. artists.
A prime example of the tension between market and taste in the Broads’ collecting
patterns is embodied in the artworks by Andy Warhol now housed in the Broad. In Eli’s 2012
book The Art of Being Unreasonable, he offered recollections and reflections on his pursuit of art
and reminisced that while he would have thought Edythe “nuts” for buying one of Warhol’s
Campbells Soup prints in the 1960s or ‘70s for $100, by the early 2000s he found himself
spending nearly $12,000,000 on a single example: Small Torn Campbell's Soup Can (Pepper
Pot).
46
This about-face can be explained both biographically and historically. In other interviews
and recollections’ Eli remarked that he didn’t truly understand Warhol until he saw a 1989
MoMA retrospective because, in Eli’s words, “retrospectives teach you a lot.”
47
In the forty
years between Edythe’s first inclination to purchase a Warhol and Eli’s decision to acquire one at
auction, the artist and his soup cans had been transformed from oddities to icons. That gradual
cultural acceptance, combined with the didacticism of a major retrospective in a well-regarded
institution like the MOMA seems to have convinced Eli that collecting Warhol was a worthwhile
pursuit.
However, scholars and critics have suggested another reading of Eli’s acquisition of
works by Warhol decades after they were first created. In a 2012 article, Los Angeles Times art
critic Christopher Knight proposed that The Broad’s works by Warhol were “prime example[s]”

46
Broad, 151.
47
Nicholson, 20; Finkel.

18
of a weak collection because “these erratic holdings don't distinguish between the artist's brilliant
1960s work and the steep decline in quality after the mid-1970s. The Broad's mixed bag seems
driven less by critical rigor than by art-market ministrations.”
48
Knight is not the only one to
imply that Eli’s interest in the art of Warhol was based on market value, with the Washington
Post’s Philip Kennicott having regarded the inaugural 2015 exhibition at the Broad as being
comprised of “the usual high-end trash.”
49
These critics paint a bleak picture of Eli’s legacy as
represented in his Grand Avenue museum, suggesting that it is little more than a vain assemblage
of high-value art.
Eli’s anecdote of Pepper Pot from his Art of Being Unreasonable illuminates how the
market and personal taste informed the late developer’s collection. At the end of his narrative
about the work’s acquisition, Broad concludes that regardless of the price of an artwork, “only
one thing matters: You have to want to look at it. You have to love it. That’s priceless.”
50
While
these musings may be read as simply the words of an individual with buyer’s remorse recorded
in a self-aggrandizing self-help book, they offer further insight. In his many interviews and
statements, Eli seems to have spoken quite candidly about not understanding certain artworks or
artists until learning about them in detail from Edythe, friends, or exhibitions, and Eli was
chronically honest even in small matters, abruptly ending one interview by checking his watch
and saying to the reporter, “Excuse me, I do other things, too.”
51
With that in mind, it seems
plausible that he did genuinely believe Pepper Pot to be an important work by Warhol, or at the
very least, Broad seems to have felt it was a work he seriously wanted to own. Despite that

48
Knight, “Broad’s Endgame for MOCA.”
49
Kennicott.
50
Broad, 151.
51
Nicholson, 25.

19
passion for the $11.7 million work, the market may still have played an implicit role in the
Broads’ choice to acquire Pepper Pot and other works from their sometimes-criticized
collection. Recent scholarship by authors such as Alain Quemin suggests that in the last half-
century, museums have taken a backseat in the creation of artistic value as those involved in the
global art market—namely galleries, auction houses, and collectors—have begun to determine
what works are artistically or historically important based upon desirability and financial value.
52

This enhanced force of the art market demonstrates that it is possible for both Eli’s statements
and his critics’ analyses to have merit.
The Broads’ paintings by Warhol, which now form part of the collection of the couple’s
Los Angeles museum seem, despite their widely varying quality, to be objects viewed with
genuine interest and value by the couple. However, it is also entirely likely that the qualitative
value Eli placed upon the works was—at least in part—derived from the quantitative valuation of
them as transferable art objects. Rather than debate whether the “erratic holdings” of The
Broad’s permanent collection are “high-end trash,” we should instead ponder how scholars and
museum workers can responsibly contextualize collections that are increasingly informed by
“art-market ministrations.” This is discussed in the penultimate and concluding chapters of my
thesis. However, it is now important to turn our attention from the Broads’ collecting habits, to
how Eli applied them to some of his first philanthropic efforts.

52
Alain Quemin, “The Market and Museums: The Increasing Power of Collectors and Private Galleries in the
Contemporary Art World,” Journal of Visual Practice 19, no. 3 (2020): 211 and 220-221. For more on the role of
markets in determining artistic desirability and perceptions of importance, see Nizan Shaked’s Museums and
Wealth: The Politics of Contemporary Art Collections (London: Bloomsbury, 2022) and Julian Stallabrass, Art
Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

20
Eli Broad and MOCA’s Founding
The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles was established in 1979 with
the assistance of local artists, civic officials, and philanthropists as an answer to numerous
complaints from disenfranchised artists who sought a replacement for the recently shuttered
Pasadena Art Museum, and as a cultural anchor for the massive, $1.2 billion California Plaza
development on Grand Avenue in what was formerly the Bunker Hill area of Downtown Los
Angeles.
53
While a massive collaborative effort, Eli appears to have taken an outsized role in the
process, as evidenced by his being named a “Founding Chairman” for the museum’s Board of
Trustees.
54
I argue that during both the founding of MOCA, and during the institution’s intense
financial difficulties in 2008, Eli helped ensure the survival and success of the museum because
it allowed him to first establish, and later maintain, his reputation as a noted philanthropist and
collector in Los Angeles.
During the 1960s and ‘70s, an increasing number of artists and scholars began to critique
the politics and practices of established art institutions throughout the U.S. because of a
perceived lack of support for emergent styles and artists. Noted museums across the country
became bellwethers of social change as women, people of color, and queer individuals fought for
inclusion in institutions seen as increasingly conservative, and even regressive. Los Angeles’ arts
institutions were not immune to this conversation. LACMA soon became a source of controversy
as African-American and women artists sought inclusion and acknowledgement in a museum
that was seen as having a collection dominated by white, male artists despite being located in a
diverse city. As a result of this push for change, numerous parallel institutions were formed by

53
Susanna Phillips Newbury, “The Artist’s Studio Exposed” in The Speculative City: Art, Real Estate, and the
Making of Global Los Angeles, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021), 145-178 and
54
Walker, 210.

21
activists and artists in order to correct issues that the bureaucratic nature of a large institution was
able to quickly address. This included numerous galleries such as Brockman Gallery and Gallery
32, before eventually growing to include large institutions like the California African American
Museum and the subject of the present chapter: MOCA.
55

In 1975, Los Angeles county’s artists mourned the closing of the Pasadena Art Museum.
It had been the primary venue for emerging and contemporary artists in the region and its closure
further exacerbated the need for a formal, artist-run arts institution in Los Angeles.
56
In early
1979, local developers, lawyers, philanthropists, the artist Robert Irwin, and noted collector
Marcia Weisman (sister to Norton Simon) formed a mayoral advisory committee to explore the
establishment a new contemporary art museum in Los Angeles. Plans for the redevelopment of
Bunker Hill had been quite public as early as the 1960s when structures began to be razed.
57

Hearing of the mayoral committee and noting California Plaza’s ongoing development on Grand
Avenue, Eli Broad recognized that the developers would be forced to allocated millions of
dollars (1.5% of building costs) to public art.
58
Eli later claimed that he concocted a scheme to
have the developers pool their “percent for art" monies into funding a single new museum.
However, Eli was only invited to join the advisory committee around Labor Day of 1979 when—

55
For more on the explosion of Black-led art spaces in Los Angeles see Kellie Jones, especially “Black West:
Thoughts on Art in Los Angeles,” in EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art, pp. 427-458, (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2011).
56
Newbury, 145 and 150.
57
In 1964, the turn-of-the-century Minnewaska Hotel (colloquially known as “The Dome”) was demolished to make
way for a temporary parking lot on the corner of Grand and Third, with the intention it would soon be developed. It
remained as a surface lot until ground was broken on The Broad over forty years later. “Bunker Hill Landmark
Being Razed,” The Los Angeles Times, 13 October 1964, pp. A3 and Sanborn Map Co., Los Angeles, Los Angeles
County, California, 1906, v.1, pp. 33.
58
Ed Leibowitz, “Committee of One,” Los Angeles Magazine, Vol. 48, No. 6 (June 2003).

22
according to other members—the L.A. Community Redevelopment Agency had already
approached the Mayor’s Advisory Committee about such a plan.
59

Though on face it seems like a minor discrepancy, the question of if Eli developed the
plan that directly led to the creation of MOCA on Grand Avenue is important in understanding
his high-profile entrance into Los Angeles’ cultural landscape as a collector and philanthropist.
Throughout his lifetime, Eli leaned on the narrative of his involvement in MOCA’s founding as a
validation of his early genius as a patron of art in the city. Lacking any strong outside evidence
to contradict other members of the 1979 mayoral committee, it should be assumed that financing
MOCA’s construction with “percent-for-art” funds from California Plaza was not Eli’s idea. As a
result, we must then see him as having seized the opportunity posed by the project rather than
originating it. Eli subsequently worked alongside Andrea Van de Kamp and others to raise the
museum’s initial $13 million endowment, contributing $1 million of his own money in the
process. These efforts and donations resulted in his being named a “Founding Chairman” of the
museum’s board of trustees, a position that he seems to have held until his 2021 death.
60

Regardless of how deep Eli’s involvement was in MOCA’s founding, these narratives are
as important for their inaccuracy as for their historical facts. The assertion that Broad virtually
singlehandedly convinced California Plaza’s developers to build MOCA allowed him to make
the claim that not only was he a successful developer, but that these successes uniquely
positioned him to be a crucial player in Los Angeles’ art world. In doing so, he established a
narrative of philanthropy and immense foresight that followed him through much of the

59
Liebowitz, n.p.; Russell James and others have cited Broad as the individual who negotiated the deal that resulted
in California Plaza developers paying over $23 million to construct the museum designed by Arata Isozaki. Whether
this attribution is a result of Broad’s self-promotion surrounding his involvement with MOCA or mere omission is
unclear.
60
Walker, 210.

23
following four decades. His contribution of one million dollars to the new museum’s endowment
similarly made him appear deeply committed to the arts, as well as buying him the title of
Founding Chairman, later reinforced by his 2008 bailout of the museum.
61
Speaking on behalf of
MOCA and those who he worked with to establish it, Eli would eventually proclaim “We don’t
want to be a provincial museum. We want to overfly New York.”
62
Backing these claims was
Eli’s personal campaign to poach the Center Pompidou’s respected, inaugural director Pontus
Hultén to serve as MOCA’s first director. While they are bold declarations of his belief in Los
Angeles’ cultural potential, such actions and statements are also emblematic of what Eli saw as a
deep and important involvement in the museum’s operations and survival, one that even lead him
to refer to fellow philanthropist Andrea van de Kamp as a “MOCA colleague.”
63

As demonstrated here (and throughout the rest of this thesis), Eli’s self-aggrandizing
mythology about MOCA’s founding is emblematic of how he sought to enact his visions of art
and institutions through “venture philanthropy,” rather than “check-writing charity.”
64
A phrase
of his own making, scholars and journalists have utilized “venture philanthropy” to analyze Eli’s
deep involvement in the workings of Los Angeles institutions, as well as the seemingly bizarre or
absurd demands he made of them that often lead to strife.
65
In his 2012 book, Eli describes the
three “tests” he used to decide if something was a worthwhile “philanthropic investment,” 1)
“Will it make a difference in 20 years?” 2) “Would it happen without our support?” and 3) “Do

61
Knight, “Eli Broad’s Endgame for MOCA.”
62
Connie Bruck, “The Art of the Billionaire: How Eli Took Over Los Angeles,” The New Yorker, 28 November
2010.
63
Broad, 63.
64
Riley, A 11.
65
Walker 212-213; Knight, “Love-Hate,” and “Change of Heart.”

24
we have the right people to make it happen?” A project was only undertaken if all three of these
questions produced an answer he found satisfactory.
66

If his writings are to be taken at their word, Eli’s analytical and results-based approach
philanthropy helps to explain his commitment to MOCA’s survival—a topic discussed in the
following paragraphs—as well as his initial interest in philanthropy as an outgrowth of
collecting. As has been recounted previously, once the walls of he and Edythe’s home were filled
with art the couple began to question what to do with their still-growing collection. The Broad
Art Foundation, MOCA, the BCAM at LACMA, and The Broad all embody Eli’s desire to have
noticeable returns on the “investments” made in the course of “venture philanthropy.” The
foundation’s lending library of art has empowered numerous institutions to stage more impactful
exhibitions for decades, meeting his criteria. Likewise, MOCA has served Los Angeles for more
than 40 years, well exceeding Eli mandate that projects create a “difference” in 20 years. It is
unlikely to have done so in the same way without his repeated involvement, and according to his
own account Eli was able to create teams of qualified individuals like Jeffery Deitch, Joanne
Hyler, and Andrea van de Kamp to manage the institution.
67
Much the same can be said of the
BCAM and The Broad, though only time will tell if they survive to have a lasting impact in the
coming decades. Though Eli’s “venture philanthropy” and “philanthropic investments” are
worthy of critique for their treatment of art and education as little different than struggling
companies to be taken over and restructured around profit, they produced the results he desired.
However, Eli‘s benevolent visions for the re-invention of Los Angeles’ cultural landscape also

66
Broad, “Giving Back,” 138.
67
Walker, 216, Newbury, 184, and Knight, “Endgame,” and Broad, 63.

25
revealed serious flaws that highlight the simultaneous benefits and dangers of the private
collector in the public sphere.
Maintaining a Museum
Just shy of forty years after the Museum of Contemporary Art was established, it faced
potential ruin for a multitude of reasons, and Eli Broad decided to come to its rescue.
68
Through
ensuring MOCA’s short term survival, Eli bolstered the chances of success for his long-term
plans on Grand Avenue. The museum not only helped to secure his reputation as a philanthropist
and power broker in Los Angeles’ art world, but maintaining an established cultural anchor on
Grand between 2
nd
and 3
rd
Street helped set the stage for his own museum’s establishment as a
prominent venue for modern and contemporary art.
Whatever the precipitating causes besides the global financial crash of that year, in 2008
MOCA was in dire need of funds to stay afloat. The museum’s endowment had dwindled as
trustees authorized the use of acquisition funds and other already-allocated monies to simply
keep the museum open in the face of a multi-million dollar shortfall in 2007 and 2008. Things
quickly became dire for the museum when the Los Angeles Times made the museum’s fiscal
woes public, a move which eventually led MOCA’s director Jeremy Strick to openly discuss a
potential merger with other area museums.
69
With the prospect of MOCA becoming a part of
LACMA, the Getty, or a university on the horizon, Eli leveraged his role as Founding Chairman
and a lifetime member of the museum’s board of trustees, to lead the charge for the museum’s
survival.
70

68
Bruck; Walker 213-214
69
Newbury, 184; For a detailed analysis of the economic factors which lead MOCA to be in such a position, see
Newbury 184-190.
70
Newbury, 184 and Knight, “Endgame.”

26
Eli drafted a plan that would see him and the Broad Art Foundation offer $15 million in
matching donations to the MOCA’s endowment, and another $15 million paid to the museum in
what was reported to be 20 quarterly installments of $750,000.
71
However, Eli issued a laundry
list of demands in exchange for his support—including capping the museum’s annual budget at
between $13 and $16 million, barring the sale of works from the collection, and forbidding any
merger with another museum located less than 100 miles from the museum’s Grand Avenue
home.
72
Though these terms were eventually rejected, Eli had enough sway through his position
as Founding Chairman of the Board of Trustees to orchestrate the firing of Strick, the hiring of
the controversial and short-lived director Jeffery Deitch, and the forced resignation of Chief
Curator Paul Schimmel.
73

Eli’s deep involvement with MOCA eventually led to his second major controversy—his
first being the rescinded offer of works to LACMA’s BCAM discussed in the following chapter.
He was openly criticized in the Los Angeles Times during the period for meddling in the
museum’s operations, and scholars up until the end of his lifetime questioned whether he truly
intended to leave MOCA independent from The Broad because of his intimate involvement in
the former museum’s operations.
74
Even more damning was the departure of multiple Los
Angeles based artists from the board of MOCA, known as the city’s most artist-centered
museum. Following, Schimmel’s resignation and Deitch’s appointment, Catherine Opie, Ed
Ruscha, John Baldessari, and Barbara Kruger all broke ties with the museum—though it appears
nearly all were lured back within a few years to help search for Deitch’s replacement when he

71
Walker, 213; At the time of this writing, it appears that the late trustee and his foundation have yet to pay all of
the 20 promised installments that totaled $15 million, a sum that for Eli Broad was roughly equivalent to a donation
of approximately $300 by a typical American household per Walker 213, and Knight’s “Endgame.”
72
Walker, 214.
73
Knight, “Endgame,” Kennedy and Vogel, “Once-Troubled,” and Walker, 214.
74
Knight, “Endgame,” and Walker, 214.

27
resigned during the third year of a five year contract with the museum.
75
Echoing Benjamin’s
hypotheses in “Unpacking My Library” Eli admitted in his 2012 autobiography that collecting is
rarely logical, and often a project borne of a near compulsive passion or desire to possess what
the collector deems to be significant.
76
Eli’s relationship with MOCA appears to similarly be
motivated by a compulsion to prove wrong those who had long criticized Los Angeles' as lacking
high culture, or even an appreciation for it.
Seemingly possessed by the idea of making Downtown Los Angeles the heart of the
city’s art world and Grand Avenue its Champs-Élysées, Eli aggressively defended his legacy at
MOCA because it anchored both his reputation and his vision for Los Angeles. MOCA’s
survival helped to enshrine Downtown Los Angeles as a viable cultural foil to Westside
institutions like LACMA and the Getty, perpetuating an old rivalry in the city. When Bunker Hill
and Grand Avenue began to be “revitalized” in the 1960s, it was largely at the urging of old
moneyed Anglo-American families such as the Chandlers—longtime owners of the Los Angeles
Times—who feared losing political power to an emergent, largely Jewish Westside elite who
were funding institutions such as LACMA.
77
The New York born Eli joined with the old Los
Angeles families in their 1979 plan to establish a new contemporary museum in Downtown that
would maintain it as a power center in the city.
78
This meshed perfectly with Eli’s goals of

75
Walker, 214 and Kennedy and Vogel, “Once-Troubled.”
76
Broad, 151.
77
Davis, 71-73; The historical, cultural, ethnic, and religious tensions inherent to the Downtown/Westside rivalry in
Los Angeles represent an intensely complicated web of competition and connection between early Anglo-American
(often white, protestant, and moneyed) settlers of the former mission town and Pasadena such as the Otis,
Huntington, and Chandler families, and later Angelinos (often Jewish, people of color, or otherwise not of the
Eastern U.S.’s hegemonic elite). While the topic is far too complex to adequately address in this thesis, it adds
another important layer of analysis that may even demonstrate that the Westwood-based developer was co-opting
the goals of the Downtown elite to beat them at their own game.
78
Despite Broad’s deep involvement in Downtown projects that sought to remake the city, it is worth noting that he
and Edythe—along with their foundation—cast a wide net with their philanthropy, including building the Broad Art
Center at UCLA and the Eli and Edythe Broad Museum of Art at Michigan State University.

28
remaking Los Angeles. In an interview given to Apollo at approximately the time of the MOCA
bailout, Eli stated that the city was on par with London, New York, or Paris, but was as yet
unrecognized because “Cities are remembered by their artists and their architecture… A lot is
happening here and a lot more will. LA is being recognized as a cultural oasis.”
79
If he wanted
Grand Park to be the city’s Central Park, and Grand Avenue its Champs-Élysées, Eli needed the
institution that established his reputation to survive as a cultural landmark alongside the Walt
Disney Concert Hall—designed by Los Angeles based starchitect Frank Gehry and opened in
2003—and his future museum.
80
This also helps to explain Eli’s categorical denial of any interest
in taking over MOCA in 2012.
81
As has been posited by Los Angeles Times critic Christopher
Knight, Eli sought to use MOCA as a springboard for his own endeavors by “burnishing” the
reputation of both himself and his collection.
82

Over the course of approximately forty years, Eli grew his reputation and his collection
alongside MOCA as the latter (?) became renowned as a champion of contemporary art in Los
Angeles. This symbiotic relationship helped Eli establish himself among the Downtown
establishment, but to truly make a name for himself as a powerful patron in Los Angeles, Eli
would need to borrow prestige from the Westside and one of its most notable institutions. In the
following chapter, I will explore how Eli Broad leveraged his involvement with LACMA and
BCAM to solidify and expand a reputation built through his relationship with MOCA. Much as
being a Founding Chairman of MOCA brought Eli and his collection to the public eye, his

79
Nicholson, 22.
80
Waldie.
81
Knight, “Burnish.”
82
Knight, “Burnish.”

29
involvement with BCAM—and the controversy that surrounded LACMA’s new wing—only
served to further legitimize the status of both collector and collection.

30
Chapter Two: The Making of a Single Collector Museum
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and
The Broad Contemporary Art Museum
During the decades he was involved with MOCA, Eli Broad also forged a relationship
with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), donating millions of dollars and
supporting the acquisition of nearly two dozen works in his role as a trustee between 1995 and
his death.
83
This relationship was more than one of mere beneficence, as is unsurprising
for a self-styled venture philanthropist. Rather than simply supporting the museum, Eli sought to
gain sway as a powerbroker on the Westside in an attempt to prove his reputation and expand his
remaking of Los Angeles beyond Grand Avenue. The controversy that followed was useful for
him and is illustrative of a collector’s unwavering determination to use art, money, and power to
concretize a vision of art and culture via a city and its institutions. Eli utilized his relationship to
LACMA in the early 2000s to solidify his reputation as a collector and philanthropist, to boost
the reputation of his collection, and to refashion the city as his ideal of an art capital.
LACMA opened its campus on “Miracle Mile” in the city’s Westside in 1964, mere
months after Downtown celebrated the opening of the Music Center’s campus on Grand
Avenue.
84
By start of the new millennium, however, LACMA’s campus was showing its age and
was in need of renovation and/or replacement. In 2001, the LACMA board of trustees opted to
hold a design contest and selected a highly ambitious design from Rem Koolhaas that fell outside

83
Unframed Editors, “In Memoriam: Eli Broad (1933-2021),” LACMA Unframed, 1 May 2021; Eli Broad was made
a life trustee in 1995 at the urging of the then recently hired director Andrea Rich, according to Haithman, Roug, and
Garvey, “LACMA Director to Resign.”
84
Davis, 72-73.

31
of the proposal’s guidelines.
85
The Dutch architects proposal was accepted late that year and
would entail closing the museum entirely for five or more years as the entire campus was razed
and rebuilt into a single structure at the cost of $300-400 million—double the $200 million
maximum requested in LACMA’s design, even without accounting for the loss of revenue such a
closure would bring.
86
Fundraising began almost immediately but no donors stepped forward
with substantial pledges, so a tax levy was proposed early in 2002 before failing to pass that
November. 364 days after the project began, it was put on indefinite hold as the institution
became increasingly weary of a five-year closure and the funds for the renovation failed to
materialize.
87
Throughout this year of tumult, Eli quietly positioned himself to lead the charge to
rebuild LACMA—albeit without the Koolhaas plan.
Though Eli did offer $2 million dollars to support the failed ballot measure for LACMA’s
Board of Trustee’s plan, and privately offered an undisclosed amount towards the $400 million
price tag of the new building, it quickly became clear that he may have had plans for his own
museum.
88
Eli was determined to “prevent another Disney Hall situation” and keep up interest
and momentum for the museum’s renovation with a gift of “more [money] than our family has
ever given before,”—$23 million.
89
Contemporary reports in publications such as the Los
Angeles Times quietly wondered what control he would seek in return for his support. Then in
June 2002, just six months after the previous plan was put on hold, Eli reached an agreement

85
Christopher Reynolds, “The Rise and Stall of LACMA’s Planned Reinvention,” The Los Angeles Times, 26
December 2002, and Michael Govan, “LACMA's New Building Is Visionary—and Big Enough,” LACMA
Unframed, 8 April 2019.
86
Reynolds, “Rise and Stall.”
87
Reynolds, “Rise and Stall,” and Govan, “LACMA's New Building.”
88
Reynolds, “Rise and Stall.”
89
Reynolds, “Rise and Stall.”

32
with LACMA Director Andrea Rich and city officials to close Ogden Street between Wilshire
and Sixth to build The Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA.
90

Eli’s accepted proposal carried numerous implicit and explicit conditions that would
cause LACMA’s new wing to open to controversy in 2008. In 2002, Eli pledged $60 million to
build the nearly 100,000 square foot galleries and endow contemporary art purchases, but
stipulated that the new wing be named after him.
91
Acting under the assumption that the new
wing would lead the Eli to make further contributions from he and Edythe’s substantial fortune
and collection, then-director Andrea Rich and others at LACMA allowed him great latitude.
92
In
2004 Eli handpicked Italian architect Renzo Piano—responsible for Paris’ Center Pompidou
whose first director he had poached for MOCA—after meeting personally with him.
93
Eli wanted
the new building to not only be named after him, but for it to be organized as The Broad
Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) at LACMA, a museum-within-a-museum largely
controlled by himself and his foundation; these intentions fed further speculation that LACMA
would receive substantial gifts from Eli and The Broad Art Foundation.
94
In 2005, roughly
halfway through the BCAM project, LACMA’s director Andrea Rich left the museum.
95
Some
reporting suggsts that—among many other factors for her resignation such as health and
tenure—bowing to Eli’s increasing demands brought private criticism to a director who, perhaps
presciently, saw them as little more than the passing fancies of a collector likely to continue
giving if indulged here and there.
96

90
Jason Edward Kaufman, “Eli Broad Chooses Renzo Piano for Los Angeles County Museum of Art Project,” The
Art Newspaper, 30 November 2003.
91
Russell, “Mega-Patron,” and Govan, “LACMA's New Building.”
92
Russell, “Mega-Patron,” and Knight, “Love-Hate.”
93
Russell, “Mega-Patron,” and Kaufman, “Broad Chooses Piano.”
94
Kaufman, “Broad Chooses Piano,” Bruck, “Art of the Billionaire,” and Walker, 216.
95
Haithman, Roug, and Garvey, “LACMA Director to Resign.”
96
Haithman, Roug, and Garvey, “LACMA Director to Resign.”

33
Rich’s resignation opened a pathway for Eli to handpick Michael Govan, of New York’s
Dia Art Foundation, as the LACMA’s next director—a move that eventually led the BCAM deal
to end in public controversy.
97
The BCAM’s construction and organization continued largely
without notice for several years after Rich’s departure and Govan’s subsequent hiring, but the
events of 2008 demonstrate that internal discussions about the BCAM’s organization, operating
costs, display practices, and the donation of Eli’s collection were becoming increasingly fraught.
Eli insisted that the BCAM, at least during his lifetime, be governed by a Board made up of
LACMA stakeholders including himself, his wife Edythe, and his longtime curator and adviser
Joanne Hyler.
98
Eli’s demand for a separate board was cited by New Yorker staff writer Connie
Bruck as one of the reasons that Rich abruptly left LACMA in 2005.
99
Furthermore, Eli refused
to endow the new wing, allegedly claiming that “no one is remembered for funding
endowments.”
100
Instead, he argued that increased visitor and membership numbers the BCAM
could bring to LACMA would be more than sufficient to support the new museum-within-a-
museum.
101
It was later alleged by LACMA that Eli and his foundation left the museum to pay
construction cost over-runs of nearly $6 million, a claim refuted by The Broad Foundation.
102
If
true, the collector not only refused to endow his expansion, but largely abandoned the project
after the BCAM opened in 2008.

97
Russell, “Mega-Patron,” and Knight, “Love-Hate.”
98
Walker, 216 and Jason Edward Kaufman, “Eli Broad and LACMA Set Up Foundation to Run Museum’s New
Wing,” The Art Newspaper, 31 March 2004.
99
Bruck, “Art of the Billionaire.” Though Rich was more evasive in other interviews, when speaking with Bruck she
was quoted as saying “You can’t unbalance the institution like that. He was displeased that I wouldn’t let
contemporary art dominate LACMA,” while another LACMA trustee said that Broad expected Rich, “to be his
puppet.” How much these ex post facto statements should be relied upon is unclear. What is apparent though, is that
the failure of donations to materialize at LACMA and the establishment of Broad’s own museum across town left a
bad taste of in the mouths of many involved in the BCAM.
100
Bruck, “Art of the Billionaire.”
101
Walker, 216.
102
Bruck, “Art of the Billionaire.”

34
The BCAM deal ultimately failed when LACMA’s new director Michael Govan rejected
Eli’s conditions for the physical display of the works he intended to donate to the BCAM. Eli
intended to donate 250 works from his collection of nearly 2,000 to the BCAM at LACMA on
the condition that they be on permanent display, and their curation be signed off on by himself,
his curator, and potentially others from the Broad Art Foundation.
103
Govan considered this to be
a breach of museological practices and principles and so refused Eli’s demand for close control,
leading Eli to declare that “it [BCAM] worked with Andrea. It didn’t work with Michael.”
104

This disagreement appeared from the outside to be the undoing of the project. In February 2008,
just weeks before the BCAM was scheduled to open, Eli publicly announced that he and his wife
were not donating work from his private collection to fill the public museum’s new, named
galleries named but were instead establishing a museum across town on Grand Avenue.
Excitement for the upcoming BCAM opening in the press was quickly replaced with
consternation and confusion as the city tried to decipher what was going on at the two Broad
museums—one named for him but without his art, and one with his art but no galleries.
105

Former LACMA Director Andrea Rich recalled that, in retrospect, “there was always the hint
that he’d [Eli] go somewhere else,” and in late 2007 he had quietly begun to work with the city
and the Related Companies (developers of Frank Gehry’s mixed-use building across from
Disney Hall), the city, and other Grand Avenue stakeholders to find a site for his new museum.
The site chosen sat across from MOCA and Disney Hall on the corner of Grand Avenue and 3
rd

103
Walker, 216, and “The Collection,” About, The Broad, Accessed 28 September 2022.
104
Bruck, “Art of the Billionaire.”
105
Knight, “Love-Hate” and “Change of Heart,” Walker 216, and Bruck, “Art of the Billionaire.”

35
Street, and had served as a parking lot since the turn-of-the-century Minnewaska Hotel was torn
down in 1964.
106

Since the BCAM controversy, two competing narratives have arisen to explain why Eli
walked away from a building named for and funded by him at LACMA: that he didn’t want his
collection to reside in long-term storage, or that he was merely boosting his and his collection’s
reputation through LACMA, as he had at MOCA. Though there is certainly evidence to support
the former conclusion, the latter seems more likely when the BCAM project is considered in
conversation with Eli’s involvement with MOCA, Disney Hall, and other Grand Avenue
projects.
Numerous statements made by Eli and his collaborators, as well as the existence of the
Broad Art Foundation, support the theory that he disliked the thought of his collection sitting in
storage for long periods. When discussing the creation of The Broad and the end of the BCAM
deal, for example, Eli claimed that he and Edythe, “were concerned that if we gave our collection
to one or several museums, 90% or so would be in storage all the time.”
107
As has been discussed
previously, Eli seems to have rarely concealed his true feelings in such sources so it is reasonable
to treat such claims as largely true. A fear of his pieces languishing in dusty storage spaces
allegedly motivated his and Edythe’s decision making before 2000, first leading them to sell the
van Gogh drawing previously discussed and eventually causing the couple to establish the Broad
Art Foundation as a repository of art to be loaned to museums throughout the globe that
otherwise may not have access to pieces by Blue Chip artists.
108
These statements were made

106
“Bunker Hill Landmark Being Razed,” The Los Angeles Times, 13 October 1964, pp. A3 and Sanborn Map Co.,
Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, California, 1906, v.1, pp. 33.
107
Knight, “Change of Heart.”
108
Barron and Zelevansky, 15; Broad, 148-149.

36
both before and after the BCAM controversy lending further credence to the argument that Eli
cancelled his planned—but unfinalized—donation of more than 250 works to LACMA because
he was earnestly concerned they would not be on permanent display in the new BCAM.
109

Additionally, it has become increasingly accepted that “the size and quality of one’s personal
collection is perceived to be prestigious and culturally advantageous,” indicating that Eli may
have been motivated (knowingly or not) by a desire to use his collection to boost both his and his
city’s reputations.
110
In doing so, like so many collectors before him, Eli could claim for himself
and his city descent from and respected history—in his case a connection to New York, Paris,
and London’s cultural landscapes.
111

Further supporting the theory that Eli backed out of the BCAM deal over the permanent
display of donated works is the design of The Broad, described by Elizabeth Diller of
architecture firm Diller Scofido + Renfro (DS+R) as “The Veil and the Vault.”
112
The company’s
competition winning design— firms including OMA, Herzog & de Meuron, and SANAA
allegedly all competed for the contract—centers the museum’s collection in a central vault dotted
with small windows into the storage area, transforming the massive storage space into a major
part of the visitor’s experience by having one enter and exit the permanent collection galleries
through it, via escalator affording the visitor exceedingly brief glances into The Broad’s
holdings.
113
Around this “vault” and the galleries is a “veil” of custom fabricated, fiber-
reinforced concrete that fills the permanent collection galleries with indirect sunlight but
prohibits the visitor from seeing out into the larger city.
114
While, as will be discussed later in

109
Walker, 216.
110
Walker, 12.
111
Thompson, 112.
112
Russell, “Mega-Patron.”
113
Kennicott, “Problem with The Broad,” and Russell, “Mega-Patron.”
114
Russell, “Mega-Patron.”

37
this chapter, this design may not be effective in its aims, the fact it was chosen over other designs
speaks to Eli’s conviction that work should be consistently on display rather than in storage.
The other frequently cited cause for Eli’s decision to cancel his planned donation of 250
works to the BCAM at LACMA is that he never wanted to be tethered to LACMA, but rather to
be associated with the institution’s cache and status as a way to “burnish” his and his collection’s
reputation.
115
Just as physical proximity to MOCA’s highly regarded permanent collection
helped The Broad—a topic discussed elsewhere in this thesis—association with LACMA would
help the private collector and his immense holdings.
116
When Eli announced his plan to finance
the BCAM—and stipulated that the new LACMA building be named for him—many at the
museum and in the Los Angeles art world assumed that he and Edythe would donate a significant
number of works. The statements and dramas surrounding the BCAM’s completion and The
Broad’s announcement imply that Eli entered the deal in good faith, and with every intention to
see it through. However, by associating himself and his collection with LACMA, Eli (whether he
knew it or not) boosted his reputation as a collector and philanthropist just as he had through his
relationship with MOCA.
117
This in turn made his future museum appear more reputable and
worthy of both consideration.
This cycle of reputation building is possible only through the complex workings of the
21
st
century art world. A private collector partners with the public museum via loans, donations,
or some combination thereof. This act of philanthropy is broadcast to other institutions and the
general public through exhibitions, press releases, and media reports. The collector in turn begins

115
L.A. Times art critic Christopher Knight first introduced the idea of “burnishing” reputations to discourses about
Broad in as an explanation for the collector’s bailout of MOCA, and his relationship to that institution in general.
See Knight, “Endgame for MOCA.”
116
Knight, “Endgame for MOCA,” and “Change of Heart.”
117
Knight, “Endgame.”

38
to be seen as a wise or beneficent private partner for public institutions with a collection to match
their actions and interests. This then creates additional opportunities for participation in public
museums, increasing the collector’s reputation until they eventually fund a new wing at a public
museum or—as is increasingly common among Western collectors—they open a private
museum to house and permanently display their collection.
118

Regardless of the intricacies of the above process of reputation building, the net result
seems to have been a significant boost in the public perception of Eli as a collector. By
ostensibly buying a museum-within-a-museum, Eli improved his collection’s standing in the
public eye, to the point that he felt it was able to form part of not just a different institution—as
Rich once alluded to—but an institution in and of itself. Whether this intricate dance of power,
reputation, and money was intentionally or incidentally set into motion by the late developer
turned collector is unclear, but its result was the same regardless, Eli’s collection and skills as
collector were legitimized by the BCAM controversy.
Despite Eli’s complex motivations, it is worth noting the good that the BCAM project
brought to LACMA and the region. As discussed in the introduction to this thesis, whatever
one’s feelings on the late collector and his practices may be, he appears to have left a legacy of
net good in the arts. Just as The Broad is a free museum accessible via public transit, the BCAM
provides roughly 100,000 feet of exhibition space on Wilshire so the county’s museum can
continue operations as usual while it constructs a new permanent collection building designed by
Peter Zumthor.
119
Even after that structure is completed, the BCAM could remain a valuable
space for temporary exhibitions.

118
Walker, 8-11.
119
Govan, “LACMA's New Building.”

39
However, it should also be acknowledged that Eli’s BCAM is a structure wholly out of
place both at LACMA and in Los Angeles. Just as during his time working with MOCA at its
founding, Eli looked to Paris’ Centre Pompidou as a model modern museum, this time selecting
the Pompidou’s architect to design BCAM.
120
Renzo Piano’s BCAM is slightly tamer than the
earlier Pompidou, but still stands out from the rest of the campus and city because of its distinct
flavor of postmodern architecture that juxtaposes dead space, abstract forms, and an external
entryway with the museum’s modernist buildings. It also doesn’t fit into the scrapped, early
2000s Rem Koolhaus scheme or Peter Zumthor’s organic, concrete structure slated to be
completed by the mid-2020s.
121
As a result, Eli’s discarded passion project is likely to remain an
incongruous and conspicuous reminder of the power of the private collector in the public
museum for many years to come.
Eli Broad’s Walt Disney Concert Hall
In order to fully comprehend the relationship between Eli’s decision to walk away from
the BCAM just weeks before its opening, and his nearly simultaneous move to announce The
Broad, it is crucial to consider his larger aims to remake Los Angeles. The controversy and new
stories that surrounded his abrupt break with LACMA and the formation of The Broad shed a
spotlight on Los Angeles, Eli, and his collection. The national and international notice Eli’s
departure from the BCAM shifted attentions away from the Westside and towards Grand
Avenue. If Eli indeed hoped that MOCA would surpass New York institutions such as The
Museum of Modern Art, did he perhaps envision The Broad as Los Angeles’ Whitney?
However, just as important as the complex mechanisms that informed the siting and

120
Walker, 210 and Newbury, 145 and 151-152.
121
Kaufman, “Renzo” and Govan, “New Building.”

40
establishment of The Broad, is its interaction with the city—a phenomenon best studied by
experiencing the museum and its surroundings.
Though many discussions of the late “venture philanthropist” have focused on the
institutions he was involved with—as this thesis does—his reach extended into education and
even scientific research.
122
However, Eli seems to have viewed himself was a developer and
businessperson first and foremost.
123
To truly understand how he sought to remake Los Angeles’
cultural landscape it is therefore necessary to look at Eli’s attempts to physically remake Grand
Avenue where his museum and MOCA are located across the street from one another. Eli’s
involvement with The Walt Disney Concert Hall, and the redevelopment of Grand Avenue more
generally, exemplify the collector’s vision of Los Angeles as a fourth art capital of the world –
after only Paris, London, and New York.
The Music Center on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles opened in 1964 as a
home for the performing arts in Los Angeles. However, it soon became apparent to even the
city’s old guard who had funded the project that the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion—home to the
Los Angeles Philharmonic and named for the notable arts patron and wife of Los Angeles Times
publisher Norman Chandler—was underwhelming and suffered from poor acoustics due the
multipurpose design of the campus.
124
In the late 1980s, these problems had become so great that

122
Closely mirroring Eli’s dispersed, “venture philanthropy” in the arts, Eli and Edythe Broad endowed numerous
stem cell research centers, first at Harvard and later at USC and UCLA. This also helps to support the idea that Eli
used a set of strict criteria to decide on a philanthropic investment. MOCA and Harvard’s stem cell research center
were ways for Eli to join existing projects with lower risk to test the metaphorical waters of a philanthropic field,
while his The Broad and his California stem cell endowments represent an increasing interest and additional
investments in both his legacy and a philanthropic project; See Walker, 216, Newbury, 184, and Knight,
“Endgame,” Broad, 63, “History,” Broad Institute, The Eli & Edythe Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, accessed
9 March 2023, “Mission and History,” Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell
Research, USC Keck School of Medicine, accessed 9 March 2023, and “About the Broads,” UCLA Eli & Edythe
Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine & Stem Cell Research, UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center, accessed
March 10, 2023.
123
Broad, “Giving Back,” 138.
124
Daniel Cariaga, “The Pavilion’s Acoustics: Do They Need Fixing?” The Los Angeles Times, 23 March 1986.

41
in mid-1987 Lillian B. Disney offered the county and the Philharmonic a $50 million dollar grant
to build a new concert hall across the street from the Music Center.
125
The Disney grant was
expected to cover much, if not all, of the construction costs on a project then-estimated to take
approximately two years. Despite having plans for a 1997 opening finalized in 1991, the project
quickly ground to a halt as costs soared, construction slowed, and the relationship between
developers, Gehry, and the county soured.
126
By 1996, the only thing completed was a county-
owned parking garage intended to serve as the building’s foundation.
127
With the project lacking
half of its estimated $200 million budget, the county demanded that funds capable of covering
construction be raised before building on the hall began in earnest.
128
Usual patrons seemed
nowhere to be found and donations were slow to trickle in following the county’s ultimatum.
In 1996, Eli Broad joined the charge to save the project and complete Walt Disney
Concert Hall not merely because the Los Angeles Philharmonic was in need of a new home, but
because Eli saw it as an opportunity to reorient Los Angeles’ cultural landscape.
129
When it
became clear the project was in jeopardy, Eli stepped in to use the resources at his disposal to
garner support for the completion of Disney Hall. Eli joined forces with his “MOCA colleague”
Andrea van de Kamp and then-Mayor Richard Riordan—the latter was running for re-election at
the time—to raise the $100 million needed to finish funding construction of the hall.
130
Though,
it took another three years, the trio eventually raised the staggering sum and ground was finally

125
Ted Vollmer, “For Disney Concert Hall: Take the $50-Million Gift, County Advised,” The Los Angeles Times,
12 June 1987. Interestingly, Lily Disney’s grant requested that the surrounding properties must be designed by the
same architect as the concert hall, this explains Frank Gehry’s mixed use development across from the hall, but
raises questions about why DS+R designed The Broad, rather than Gehry.
126
Newbury, 201, and Diane Haithman, “Disney Hall: Unfinished Symphony?: The Dream of a ‘world-class’ Music
Facility is Entangled in so Many Financial Problems that its Future May be in Jeopardy,” The Los Angeles Times, 27
February 1995.
127
Newbury, 201.
128
Haithman, “Unfinished Symphony.”
129
Broad, 36 and 63.
130
Broad, 63.

42
broke on the concert hall at the end of 1999.
131
Eli’s reliance on his own MOCA fundraising
networks as well as Riordan’s political connections illustrates that, for Eli, the project was quite
symbolically important. This is also supported by Eli’s statements on Disney Hall. In 1995, the
chair of the Music Center’s board described the hall as “a cause… that allows the cultural life of
this city to coalesce.”
132
Eli took such claims one step further. In his 2012 book, Eli asserted that
Los Angeles’ Downtown, and especially Grand Avenue, was “a place whose world-class
potential was going almost wholly unrealized” because it had no “defining landmark like the
Eiffel Tower in Paris, Big Ben in London, and the Opera House in Sydney.”
133

For Eli, the Walt Disney Concert Hall seemed to be a symbolic affirmation of
Downtown’s battle for supremacy with Westside at the dawn of the 21
st
century. As Mike Davis
argued, Gehry’s work represents a monumental appropriation of urban detritus—such as that left
behind in the revitalization of Bunker Hill—via often unidealistic and authoritarian design.
134

Within such an understanding of the architect’s oeuvre, Gehry’s Disney Hall can be understood
as subtly co-opting the visual language of power and control—as well as some of its physical
mechanisms—to communicate Grand Avenue’s preeminence over the Westside. Even the
architect and the building’s design carried significance for Eli. To a large degree, this was
successful. Walt Disney Concert Hall has become a symbol of Los Angeles, though perhaps not
the singular icon of the city Eli seems to have hoped for. It has appeared in countless travel
guides, TV shows, and films since opening in 2003, and now stands as the one of most

131
Diane Haithman, “7 Years Later, Disney Hall Breaks Ground Once Again,” The Los Angeles Times, 9 December
1999.
132
Haithman, “Unfinished Symphony.”
133
Broad, 36.
134
Davis, 236-240.

43
recognizable structures in Los Angeles after the Hollywood Sign, Griffith Observatory, and
perhaps the Hollywood Bowl or Chinese Theatre.
Eli Broad’s Other Grand Avenue Projects
Despite their prominence in the public imagination, Walt Disney Concert Hall, MOCA,
and The Broad were not the only projects Eli was involved in along Grand Avenue—they are
simply the best documented at this time. However, the evidence of the late collector’s
involvement in Grand Park and The Grand by Gehry (a mixed-use development across from
Disney Hall) as a member of the Grand Avenue Authority help demonstrate that Eli saw the few
blocks-long section of Downtown Los Angeles as a model for how the city at large could
become a world capital of art.
Established in 2000, the Grand Avenue Authority (GAA) was created as a public-private
partnership to first explore, and then direct, the redevelopment of an area razed decades earlier
for an as-of-then-unrealized transformation of the mostly residential Bunker Hill into “a vibrant
regional center.”
135
Eli Broad was appointed chair of the $1.8 billion Grand Avenue Project.
136

The committee chose the Related Development Companies in 2004 to lead the construction of a
mixed use structure designed by Gehry, a public park, and a hotel totaling over three million
square feet of Downtown real estate.
137
However, even the Los Angeles business community
expressed concerns over whether the GAA and Related’s plans would represent the
constituencies around because Eli frankly stated that a design could not be “imposed” upon the

135
Meredith Drake Reitan, “‘A Cloud Burst Erupts’: Visual Rhetoric And Los Angeles’ Grand Intervention,”
Journal of Urban Design 21, No. 6, pp. 802-815, here 802.
136
Betsy Streisand, “L.A. Rainmaker,” U.S. News and World Reports, 12 February 2007.
137
Reitan, 802 and Andy Fixmer, “Grand Ave. Plan Will Be Shaped By Small Group,” Los Angeles Business
Journal, 16 August 2004, pp. 1 and 36, here 1.

44
project’s financial backers.
138
Rather, it appears that Eli—a “Committee of One” according to
some sources—attempted to imposed his vision of a sprawling 16 acre park and surrounding
commercial and public buildings on the city via his role on the GAA.
139
Eli intended to transform
the emerging cultural corridor into an American “Champs-Élysées” made up of a wide boulevard
lined with cultural and architectural landmarks.
140
Had his vision been fully realized, Downtown
would perhaps have wrested the spotlight back from the Westside and Los Angeles could have
been established as Eli’s fourth cultural capital.
When the Related Company’s development slowed in 2007 and 2008, Eli Broad used his
sway with The Grand Avenue Authority to negotiate the purchase of the 510,000 square foot
parcel—then a parking lot—for a mere $7.7 million, with a $10 million rebate upon the
museum’s completion and opening.
141
When final plans for the museum were made public in
2011, they were in fact far from finalized.
142
Just weeks before the press conference which
released DS+R’s design to the public, Eli had begun new discussions with Related and the GAA
to border his museum with a park to the South and West in order to set it apart from the planned
Hope Street Metro station and surrounding structures. In practice, the western plaza was turned
to a grey expanse of vents and HVAC units, while the southern plaza was reduced to an
exceedingly narrow green space. However, on the eve of his museum’s opening, Eli expressed

138
Fixmer, 36.
139
Liebowitz, “Committee of One,” and Fixmer, 36.
140
Waldie, “After Broad,” and Streisand “L.A. Rainmaker,” and Caroline A. Miranda, “Post-Eli Broad: Time for a
New Giving Model,” The Los Angeles Times, 6 June 2021.
141
Walker, 216 and Fixmer, 36.
142
Christopher Hawthorne, “The Broad's Other Side: Eli Broad's Desire for a Grand Avenue Plaza has Architects
and Agencies Scrambling,” The Los Angeles Times, 12 January 2011.

45
pride in Grand Avenue’s redevelopment and believed that it benefited Los Angeles tremendously
stating, “I can think of no city which, within three blocks, has such great architecture.”
143

The Broad Today
Considering the wider scope of Eli Broad’s downtown projects helps to explain the
present state of his Grand Avenue museum and lends further credence to the concept that the
museum—at least in its present, collector focused state—is an attempt to remake Los Angeles’
cultural landscape. When it first opened in 2015, The Broad and its permanent collection
exhibition were met with quite mixed reviews. As noted previously, the Los Angeles Times’ art
critic Christopher Knight was skeptical of the collection, as was the Washington Post’s Philip
Kennicott.
144
While the museum’s founder has since died and the collection has been reinstalled
at least once, many of the complaints about the galleries registered by these and other critics
remain a problem. Other questions about The Broad emerge in one’s experience of the museum
and its relationship to the city Eli sought to remake—particularly if the visitor is able to compare
it to LACMA or the Getty. While The Broad serves as a model for its founder’s ideas about how
a Los Angeles museum should function, it prohibits many visitors from meaningfully interacting
with the cultural landscape Eli sought to remake.
The Broad embodies Eli’s refashioning of the city in the image of its counterparts, rather than
itself. Throughout one’s experience of the museum, the visitor is thoroughly disconnected from
the experience of the city, its urban fabric, and its visual cultures. The Getty presents itself to the
approaching motorist from its position high above Westwood, while LACMA’s height and
surrounding art installations ensure that the museum is visible on three sides. Visible from

143
Gabriel Kahn, “Bullish About L.A.: Billionaire Booster Eli Broad on Fixing the City and Building his Legacy,”
Los Angeles Magazine, April 2014.
144
Knight “Change of Heart” and “Love-Hate,” and Kennicott.

46
multiple highways and surface roads and located alongside Downtown arts landmarks like the
Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Chandler Pavilion, and MOCA, the museum is firmly planted in
the cityscape. However, unlike LACMA and the Getty which are designed around seeing and
being seen in the city, The Broad rejects the visitor’s attempts to interact with the city in which it
is located.
While The Broad is highly visible to the passerby, the visitor’s experience of the museum is
disconnected from the experience of the city. Take for example, one’s entrance into the museum.
While the design and vehicular approach of other Los Angeles institutions acknowledges that,
for reasons too complex to enumerate here, one is most likely to encounter the city and its arts
institutions via a private motorcar, The Broad makes no such accommodation. The visitor will
almost certainly access the museum via a subterranean street and garage more fitting of
Chicago’s circuitous, layered roads than Los Angeles’ wide, unending boulevards. The
pedestrian entrance to the museum lies in the space between The Broad’s striking, cocoon-like
façade and its actual structure, whisking the visitor out of view of the city almost immediately
upon arrival from either the street or the parking garage. There is no mediated removal from the
mundanity of the city such as the Getty Center’s trams or the escalators at LACMA’s BCAM,
but an abrupt departure from the repetitive, geometric forms of Los Angeles into the undulating,
organic forms of the cavernous museum.
The relationship of The Broad to Los Angeles contrasts with the form and function of The
Bonaventure which lays just blocks away from it. As that older building represented an
intentional departure from the traditional design of a hotel, The Broad marks a distinct departure

47
from conventional understandings of a museum.
145
A visit to Eli’s Grand Avenue museum
constitutes a consciously designed experience of both architecture and art, even including often
used, selfie-ready locations at artworks throughout the space. After entering the veil to the
museum’s lobby, one ascends from the cavernous and womblike entrance through a narrow and
dark escalator into the wide, white-walled permanent collection galleries flooded with indirect
light that filters through the fiber-reinforced concrete veil and copious glass windows and
skylights. Jeff Koon’s Tulips are meanwhile a prime example of the museum’s tailoring to social
media as they are currently the first work one sees after emerging into the wide permanent
collection galleries at the top of the museum’s escalator. During my own visit, at least a dozen
individuals and groups stopped in the busy space to take pictures with the work. Furthermore, in
line with Eli’s desire to “overfly New York” and change Los Angeles’ cultural landscape the
“veil” designed by DS+R intentionally divides the city and museum. The institution “does not
wish to be a part of the city, but rather its equivalent and its replacement or substitute.”
146

While The Bonaventure kept the city out via it’ mirrored glass exterior, it allowed the city-
within-the-city to act as a sort of panopticon where one could see without being seen. The
galleries of The Broad meanwhile, prevent visitors from placing the museum and their
experience of it within the cityscape. The outer curtain, or veil, lets in abundant natural light but
provides very little direct vision in or out of the galleries to the city around the museum. The
only places within the museum where one can clearly see the city are the lobby gift shop, the
corners of the permanent collection galleries, and the “oculus” of the building’s “veil,” a space
tucked away from the galleries in a conference room behind locked doors, wholly inaccessible

145
Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (July-
August): 59 – 92, here 80.
146
Knight, “Endgame,” and Jameson, 81.

48
for most visitors. The Broad entirely removes the visitor from the city beginning with their
entrance (particularly if they arrive by car) and concluding with their exit through the gift
shop.
147

The determined removal of one’s experience from the cityscape and traditional museums
seems to be part of a larger attempt to remake Los Angeles as something other than itself. By
turning the visitor’s view away from the city, the museum declares that if the city’s critics could
be satisfied, Los Angeles is the equal of London, Paris, or New York. Through architectural
design and artistic content, The Broad seeks to prove that Los Angeles is not a sprawling, on-
going studio full of creation as Eve Babitz once claimed, but that it is the real, proper city with a
valuable visual culture that critics have long denied it was.
148
Its founder and namesake, Eli
Broad, claimed as much when he said that Los Angeles was one of the world’s four cultural
capitals along side Paris, London, and New York.
149
Furthermore, one’s potentially off-putting
entrance to the museum via car must be considered in conversation with the redevelopment of
Grand Avenue, a project Eli was closely involved in for nearly three decades. If one takes public
transit to the museum, they would arrive either via bus directly below the “oculus” or may soon
arrive at the currently uncompleted metro station behind the museum, just as one might arrive at
the Centre Pompidou in Paris, The Guggenheim in New York City, or The British Museum in
London.
150
Eli saw Grand Avenue as an American Champs-Elysees where one may walk from

147
Jameson, 82.
148
Babitz, 8.
149
Louise Nicholson, “Art at Speed,” Apollo 167 (2008): 22.
150
Eli Broad, and Henry Huntington before him, had unusual and somewhat conflicting relationships to art,
philanthropy, and public transit. Both saw fit to bequeath their substantial private collections to the public, albeit
through privately controlled, named institutions. However, while Huntington’s early 20
th
-century suburban
developments were linked by his Pacific Electric “Red Cars,” many of KB Homes’ Los Angeles area developments
later in that century were intentionally distant from the city and it’s meager public transit network, using vehicle
ownership as a subtle bar for entry into new middle and upper class subdivisions as far away as the Antelope Valley.
While the reasons for this change are too complex to adequately investigation in the present thesis, the links (and

49
Grand Park, past the buildings of the Music Center and to his own museum.
151
Within this
scheme, one’s approach and entrance into The Broad is fully integrated into the (re-made) city of
the late developer’s dreams—however untrue those dreams are to many people’s current
experience of Los Angeles.
The galleries are similarly disconnected from the city. Reflecting on Eli’s legacy after his
2021 death, Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight lamented the collector’s seeming lack
of serious investment in Los Angeles artists.
152
He alleged that despite Eli’s apparent devotion to
the city’s art institutions as well his conservative and cautious purchasing habits prohibited their
inclusion in The Broad’s collection. According to Knight, the vast majority of artists represented
in the BCAM’s first show—an exhibition comprised solely of work’s from Eli’s private
collection—were from Blue Chip galleries such as Gagosian because while Eli had helped the
careers of a select few Los Angeles-based artists like Cindy Sherman, his collection largely
followed trends rather than setting them.
153
At both The Broad’s opening and at the present
moment, the museum is not organized along thematic or stylistic connections, but is comprised
of entire galleries devoted to just one or two artists—a room of Kara Walker’s works, another of
Warhol's, of Ruscha’s, of Koons’, of Twombly’s, of Holzer, and so on. This direct departure
from conventional display practices directly reflects Eli’s desires to have as many works on view
as often as possible. As of late 2022, visitors to the museum still saw very little work by Los
Angeles artists, save for perhaps Ed Ruscha. Instead, the permanent collection galleries focused
heavily on the aforementioned East Coast artists. Many of these spaces are dramatically

differences) between Huntington and Broad are worthy of more research because they seem emblematic of the city’s
changing demographics and identity.
151
D.J. Waldie, “After Eli Broad, how will we remake Los Angeles?” The Los Angeles Times, 9 May 2021.
152
Knight, “Love-Hate.”
153
Knight, “Love-Hate.”

50
installed. With little room for one to sit and contemplate works as is typical in other museums,
reflecting the way Broad himself sped through museums while traveling.
154
More than that, the
juxtaposition of a selfie-ready installation with Eli’s distinct vision of what Los Angeles art
should emulate makes it difficult for a visitor “to tell if you’re dealing with real true illusion or
false one,” as Babitz once wrote of the city at large.
155
Just as the building could exist without the
context of the city it seeks to remake, so could the collection it houses.
However, the Broad is unable to fully remove the essence of the city from its mediated
spaces. Every installation is impeccably polished in its conception and execution. A work by
Holzer illuminates a small gallery in rapturous light, while Koons’ sculptures glisten with a
mirror finish despite the wandering hands of the tourists whose first stop after the lobby is often
the obvious selfie opportunity which awaits them in the gallery. Small monuments to Los
Angeles’ finish fetish lie throughout galleries with exactingly hung paintings on unmarred walls,
accompanied by perfectly aligned labels. And more than that, The Broad is unable to resist the
communal intimacies described by Babitz’s “Slow Days.” Like the art of the city, the museum’s
permanent collection exhibition rejects “standards of organization and structure,” displaying art
not chronologically or thematically but in distinct galleries devoted to the work of a single artist.
Sound reverberates off the undulating ceiling and over too-short gallery walls, throwing echoes
of disembodied voices across galleries, discordantly connecting conversations and ideas between
distant visitors. And while the “incredibly beautiful young waitresses” Babitz once wished would
poison their lecherous customers who have grown old, you find yourself rooting for their

154
Liebowitz, “Committee of One.”
155
Babitz, 8; Though the origin of selfie-centric installations and experience-based museums is certainly open for
debate, “spectacle and wonder” have increasingly become popular ways for private collectros’ museums to draw
visitors, see Walker, 230 for more on this phenomeon.

51
inheritors, the gallery attendants telling Los Angeles reminding tourists to please, not touch the
art.
156

Furthermore, Eli’s relationship to Los Angeles artists is not so simple as the dearth of local
artists in The Broad suggests. In the same article, Knight noted that Eli had purchased a large
number of works by Southern California-based artists as part of the Kaufman & Broad corporate
collection. Though the Times’ critic claimed that the disconnect between Eli’s personal and
corporate holdings was a matter of cautious investment, it inadvertently revealed more about
Eli’s collecting and thoughts on Los Angeles art than previously believed. It can be reasonably
argued that, based on his involvement in MOCA’s 2008 revival, though Eli closely guarded his
own finances he was also reluctant to abandon or imperil past and present ventures. Why then
would he choose to have his own corporation hold potentially risky investments?
I instead argue that he viewed the conspicuous inclusion of New York artists in his Grand
Avenue museum as a legitimizing force for both his museum and Los Angeles’ artistic culture.
Western collectors have long utilized art and artifact from other places and times as a means to
claim kinship with what their culture respected whether that be through the emulation nobles,
knowledge of Greek culture, or affinity with Roman Emperors.
157
Though his collection was
made up of modern and contemporary western art rather than spoliated statuary, Eli similarly
attempted to seized upon the reputation of New York as a global artistic center to prove that Los
Angeles was no longer a provincial artistic culture dominated by “dopiness” and “unserious”
artists.
158
Furthermore, his funding of UCLA’s Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center, home to that

156
Babitz, 9.
157
Thompson, Possession, 6, 23-25, and 112. Thompson’s 2016 monograph charts a progression of collecting from
antiquity to the modern day and convincingly demonstrates that core motivations for collecting such as power,
prestige, and identity have motivated collectors from the third century BCE Attalids through John Paul Getty.
158
Babitz, 8.

52
university’s visual arts program and studios, represents a deeper commitment to Los Angeles’
artistic community than a corporate collection alone would imply.
159

159
“The Broad Art Center at UCLA,” Grantees, The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, Accessed 25 January 2023.

53
Conclusion
“The most distinguished trait of a collection will always be its transmissibility.”
-Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting,” 1931
160

The Broad as Cultural Site
Just as Eve Babitz claimed that “you can’t write a story about L.A. that doesn’t turn
around in the middle or get lost,” it is impossible to write an account of a prolific collector’s
museum without considering the other projects and activities of the collector.
161
More than that,
the collector’s worldviews and experiences shape their perception of their objects—and their
objects’ fates—so it is essential to analyze a legacy like Eli Broad’s holistically. Just as John
Paul Getty’s roots in the oilfields of Oklahoma influenced his eventual decision to educate the
“twentieth-century barbarian” with his collection, it appears that Eli’s experiences in life and
business motivated him to build and display he and Edythe’s art collection to remake Los
Angeles’ cultural landscape in a way that would cause it to be seen as the equal of London, Paris,
or New York.
162

The Broad exists on Grand Avenue alongside MOCA and Walt Disney Hall not by
accident, but as part of a concerted effort on the part of the institution’s founder Eli Broad to
fashion the city into a cultural capital. Through his involvement with MOCA, LACMA, Disney
Hall, and The Broad, the late philanthropist was able to transform his image from that of a
developer-come-collector into a preeminent patron of the arts. However, this attention came at a
cost. By shaping Los Angeles to fit with his own visions of how a modern city’s artistic culture,

160
Benjamin, “Library,” 66.
161
Babitz, 7.
162
Thompson, 117 and Getty, 279-281.

54
Broad inadvertently harmed the place he championed. The dearth of Los Angeles artists and the
museums disconnection from the city it calls home does a disservice to the artistic culture and
cultural landscape of the city. Rather than being an ever evolving, open air studio that Eve Babitz
once suggested it was, The Broad crystalizes Los Angeles art as if in amber, rendering it
perpetually “stupid and inert.”
163
The voiceless and emotionally dead objects therefore do not
benefit from comparison to London, Paris, and New York, but instead suffer from it. By forcing
the Los Angeles into these foreign molds, Eli and his namesake institution leave the city little
better off than the regressive, backwater of culture it has long been lampooned as by outsiders.
Though The Broad’s neighbors and connected projects like MOCA and the BCAM may do a
better job of highlighting local artistic voices, it appears that Eli may have failed in the end to
help his adopted home “overfly New York.”
164
The Broad therefore serves as a beautiful but
unfortunate cautionary tale of how a “committee of one” can drive a project towards both new
heights and failures.
165

Despite these issues, it would be difficult to argue in good faith that Broad’s efforts to
establish and preserve MOCA and The Broad—both free at the time of this writing—as
museums that millions can access by public transit is anything but a net positive. However, that
does not mean these institutions—or their most significant financial backer—are faultless. The
intersection of Grand and 2
nd
in what used to be Bunker Hill is quite far from more
socioeconomically and racially heterogeneous areas of the city, and in fact has become
increasingly gentrified since the Second World War. While MOCA seems to make earnest
efforts to connect with more diverse communities, such as in East and South L.A., philanthropic

163
Babitz, 7 and Holt, 121.
164
Bruck.
165
Leibowitz.

55
and civic arts funding still overwhelmingly goes (or stays) in Downtown and the Westside.
166

Furthermore, while MOCA sprang from a desire to support local artistic innovation, The Broad
seems to have too few works by local artists that are shown too infrequently. LACMA, in turn,
has been left with a massive, named exhibition space that is disconnected from the museum’s
future building and is filled with little work from the named donor.
Visitors have similarly mixed reactions to the Broad’s cave-live permanent collection
viewing area. During a visit in September 2022, I overheard multiple guests discussing the
partially visible vault. One middle-aged visitor remarked to her partner that she was impressed
by the size of the collection in storage and “all of the art they can change out,” while another
visitor deemed it “odd” to be able to see the museum’s backstage. One must wonder if Eli merely
wanted tourists to gawk at the number of artworks his namesake museum holds, rather than
contemplate the art’s importance. If Knight’s slightly cynical reading is to be relied upon, it
appears that the late collector is happy with either—as long as people are visiting his Grand
Avenue museum and MOCA.
167
A failure to establish Los Angeles as a fourth artistic center of
the modern world does not mean the project entirely failed by Eli’s own criteria and ideals. The
Broad preserves he and his wife’s name and place in the city, shows their art more than it would
be had it been donated elsewhere, and it is indeed a project that they were able to facilitate but
that would not have happened without their assistance—if it is still making a difference in Los
Angeles in 20 years remains to be seen.
168
Perhaps a selfie-optimized, free museum in

166
As far back as the 1980s, Mike Davis noted that private collectors and institutions were routinely spending much
more on the acquisition of works than the city was spending on the arts in South Central and East L.A.; Davis, 80.
167
Knight, “Burnish.”
168
Broad, “Giving Back,” 138.

56
Downtown will turn out to be a long overdue draw for younger, artistic, and more diverse crowds
both in Los Angeles and further afield.
The Future of Collectors in Museums
Discussions of whether a given institution or collector is “good” or “bad” inevitably lead
to hair-splitting, moralizing, and partisan bickering. Let us ask instead, how we should work with
complex legacies and institutions in order to better serve the cities where we live and the fields
that we study. It is imperative that we consider art collectors and their philanthropic
involvements by looking at the sum of their contributions in conversation, as this thesis has
attempted to do. By doing, so we illuminate new insights about an individual’s motivations and
aspirations that deeply affected their actions. Such revelations are hinted at by contemporary
publications—and even the collector’s own observations and reflections—but the full impact of
the individual collector is difficult to comprehend until the end of their career, or after their
death.
Contrary to Walter Benjamin’s claim that “the phenomenon of collecting loses its
meaning as it loses its personal owner… the objects get their due only in the latter [the private
collection],” the legacy of many prominent present-day collectors will live on in public and
private museums.
169
As scholars and museum professionals, we should challenge ourselves and
our institutions to think critically about the collectors and donors who enable our work.
Museums, for better or worse, are dependent on collectors for funding, artworks, and
construction. As a result, interrogating complex relationships serves to illuminate the lacunae in
donated collections and self-styled museums, empowering institutions and scholars to more
thoughtfully and responsibly serve our publics.

169
Benjamin, “Unpacking my Library,” 67.

57
Returning to Detroit
Though such grand notions of institutional and systemic adaptation have the potential to
inspire real change, the question remains of how to thoughtfully organize an exhibition or
donation with a collector—the day-to-day work that must come before any potential overarching
changes. To imagine solutions, we might return to The Detroit Institute of Arts’ 2019 exhibition
Extraordinary Eye, Extraordinary Gift: The Legacy of Margaret Herz Demant. How can a
curator negotiate the seemingly impossible position of satisfying a collector’s bequest, educating
an institution’s publics, and reassuring other donors who plan to trust the public institution with
their private wealth or holdings? This exhibition is a perfect case study in how one might balance
these concerns on an aesthetic or spatial level, and when grappling with a difficult or politicized
subject such as orientalism and primitivism.
How could one evaluate the collector as part of the curatorial process? A basic
knowledge of their biography might be helpful. Knowing that Herz Demant was raised in inter-
war Berlin before fleeing to England as part of the Kindertransport might help explain her
investment in collecting modern art, just as her family’s background as interior designers may
shed light upon why she chose to collect artworks and artifacts from cultures viewed as primitive
“others” by the West at the turn of the century.
170
Similarly, it is important to consider Herz
Demant’s decades long relationship with the museum because collectors are often informally
coached by curators and other museum professionals on what artworks are important to collect
with the tacit understanding that works bought will donated or bequeathed. Does this historical,
institutional connection help to explain a difficult to exhibit collection? Finally, what else did the

170
“Funeral Details for Margaret Herz Demant,” Ira Kaufman Chapel, Accessed 3 February 2023.

58
collector do in their lifetime? Did they fund other projects, participate in advisor organizations,
or do other things that explain their habits of collecting and donating?
Acknowledging both role of a collector’s biography and issues with their collection’s
thesis—primitivism in Herz Demant’s case, and a yearning to compare to New York in
Broad’s—can allow museums and scholars to better engage with objects and the publics they
seek to educate and inform. While it may be difficult to tackle these issues head on via an extant
exhibition without offending a donor or their surviving family, there are other possibilities. An
exhibition like Extraordinary Eye could have been split into separate exhibitions if scheduling
allowed (such one of modern prints and one of African cultural and art objects), while The
Broad’s galleries can highlight collection artists from Los Angeles. The Grand Avenue
institution could even make a concerted effort to purchase and display up and coming artists of
the region in the way the KB Homes did at Broad’s urging.
An embrace of the private collector’s legacy in the public museum is likely far from
second nature for many. However, it may help us disentangle the individual from the institution,
thus allowing scholars to more accurately and transparently construct and transmit ideas about
history and culture for a museum’s publics. The name of an institution is likely to remain, but
how we approach a collector as embodied by their institution or collection can change. It will
undoubtedly be a difficult and gradual project, but change empowers us to honor art, artists, and
donors more meaningfully. By recontextualizing and reevaluating a collection like The Broad’s,
the museum and the city could indeed surpass New York, London, and Paris—or at least come to
rival them. By acknowledging the collector’s goals, biases, and ambitions as institutions and
professionals, we ensure that we do not accidentally perpetuate harmful or regressive ideas, that
we give voice to the communities we serve, and that we responsibly serve arts many publics.

59
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract "Collecting Power: Eli Broad and the Re-making of Art in Los Angeles" explores how the views, tastes, and epistemologies of a collector can impact how knowledge about art is recorded, understood, and transmitted when the private collection meets the public-facing museum. This thesis disentangles how the legacy of a private collector can affect public museums, whether through the donation of a collection, or in the case of The Broad, the establishment of a single-collector museum. I assert that The Broad, rather than merely being a “vanity museum,” is emblematic of how the beliefs of an individual collector are manifested in the institutions they support, as well as the immense influence individuals can have over a city’s cultural landscape. This thesis is demonstrated via case studies including Eli Broad’s involvement with The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), The Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and The Broad.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Short, Jonas Hyer (author)

Core Title Collecting power: Eli Broad and the re-making of art in Los Angeles

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere

Degree Conferral Date 2023-05

Publication Date 09/23/2024

Defense Date 03/23/2023

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag art,BCAM,Broad Contemporary Art Museum,Collecting,contemporary art,curation,curatorial studies,Development,Downtown,Edythe Broad,Eli Broad,Grand Avenue,LACMA,Los Angeles,Los Angeles County Museum of Art,MOCA,modern art,Museum of Contemporary Art,Museum Studies,museums,OAI-PMH Harvest,Painting,philanthropy,Real estate,Sculpture,The Broad,Westside,Westwood

Format theses (aat)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Lin, Jenny (committee chair), Hudson, Suzanne (committee member), Pon, Lisa (committee member)

Creator Email jhshort@usc.edu,JonasShort21@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC112847784

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Format theses (aat)

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