Los Angeles paean to pop art, The Broad, is a patchy parade
Opening show at one of the world's newest art museums - a showcase for Eli and Edye Broad's decades of collecting - is not the sweeping, chronological journey it promises, but the depth of representation of individual artists makes the visitor linger
American billionaire philanthropists and art collectors Eli and Edye Broad this week launched their US$140 million museum, The Broad, with a 50,000-square-foot exhibition drawn exclusively from its wide-ranging permanent collection.
Roughly 250 pieces by about 60 artists have been chosen from about 2,000 possibilities by nearly 200 artists.
But any curator will tell you that it takes time to learn a new building’s personality quirks – to figure out how best to configure temporary walls, take advantage of sight lines that let art pull a visitor through the galleries and calibrate an installation so that objects visually speak to one another. The Broad’s inaugural installation began only in June. That’s quick.
The museum bills the exhibition as “a sweeping, chronological journey” through the collection. But, in addition to feeling random (why this artist and not that one?), much of the best work has been seen before. Two large Broad exhibitions – in 2001 and 2008 – were held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The strongest feature is the collection’s depth in the representation of individual artists, especially pop-art-related. When the couple commit to acquiring an artist’s work, usually they collect in depth.