Eli Broad
Category: Collector
Nationality: American
Last Year: 6
The former housing mogul Eli Broad is not only the
five.lin
most powerful person in Los
Angeles’s art community, he’s arguably the most powerful Angeleno, full stop.
Love him or hate him, he’s been the prime mover behind the city’s civic and
cultural recovery from the LA riots. Just a few of his recent triumphs: Broad led
the billionaire boys’ club that fought to build Frank Gehry’s luminous Walt Disney
Concert Hall despite skyrocketing costs and a decade of opposition; he formed
a powerful private collection that serves as a lending library of contemporary
work; and he has put together the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, a much-
awaited, Renzo Piano-designed appendage of the sprawling Los Angeles
County Museum of Art. And he came close to purchasing the Los Angeles
Times, the largest newspaper in the American West. Broad has buildings named
after him at UCLA (housing the university’s top-notch art department and its
faculty galleries), CalTech, Harvard and MIT, and a makeover of downtown LA
will bear his imprint. Though he’s considered a micromanager who enjoys putting
his stamp on things – the opera tenor Plácido Domingo was renamed last year
the Eli and Edythe L. Broad General Director of Los Angeles Opera – few doubt
Broad’s civic seriousness: he speaks often about putting LA on the map as one of
the big four cultural centres, alongside New York, London and Paris, and about
oy Lichtenstein 2007 (5)
letting the world know. And he’s made a few humble gestures, calling himself and
state of R his wife ‘guardians of this work during our lifetime’. But there’s no question that
he likes the power that guardianship endows: he’s keeping all the suitors waiting
4) , © E
as to which museum will get his collection when he moves to the big country
Sanders ( club in the sky. He owns a collection that’s second to none in California – though
in some ways without personality – full of works by Lichtenstein, Warhol, Jeff
eenfield-
Koons and Charles Ray.
imothy Gr
photos: T
power 100_Layout 1-10.indd 103 29/9/07 15:58:17
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