Eli Broad Plans His Own Art Museum

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed)
Nov 19th 2008 at 7:02PM

So maybe now we know why billionaire art collector Eli Broad was so busy at the contemporary art shows in New York last week. Bloomberg reports that Broad is interested in building a public museum in Beverly Hills, California. The news comes after a year in which he got his own building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art but then decided not to give his collection to the museum. Broad's new museum would display works from his charitable foundation and personal collection and would hopefully open in about three years. It would be located near the corner of Santa Monica and Wilshire boulevards and unseat a Starbucks. The foundation already has a headquarters and private museum in Santa Monica.

Broad's foundation is heavily contemporary with photographs by Cindy Sherman, paintings by Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol's 1986 silkscreen of the Statue of Liberty, Damien Hirst's 1994 lamb in formaldehyde, and Charles Ray's 1973 collection of 16 Kodachrome self-portraits called ``All My Clothes.'' Last week he picked up Ed Ruscha's 1969 mustard-hued ``Desire'' for $2.4 million, Donald Judd aluminum and Plexiglas sculpture for $1.1 million, a small Robert Rauschenberg painting for $2.6 million, and a Jeff Koons sculpture for $2.2 million.

Tags: art, art museum, ArtMuseum, beverly hills, BeverlyHills, eli broad, EliBroad