The future of the Broad Art Foundation

UPDATE: I've made a change to a bracketed explanation below. Instead of describing BAF as looking to consolidate its collection under one roof, I've clarified that to "operation." BAF would like to have everything it does -- storage of the collection and administrative operations -- in one place.

In which the best stuff is in the last half: Much of the initial reaction to yesterday's Eli Broad collection-related news has been that this is a blow to LACMA. That's true, it's obvious, and I'm not sure there's much more to say about that part of the story. Apparently LACMA director Michael Govan agrees: He wouldn't even talk to his hometown paper.

To recap: The Broads have decided to consolidate their 2,000-piece art collection under the purview of the Broad Art Foundation. (The foundation already owns 1,500 works, the Broads own the other 500 and those are on their way to the foundation. The picture here is of foundation HQ in Santa Monica.) Nothing from either collection will be sold during Eli Broad's lifetime, at least. Art from the BAF collection will be made available to institutions as loans.

In other words, when it comes to the Broads' collection, the status quo essentially prevails with one important new bit: For now, at least, the work will not be gifted to LACMA. The Broads' collection is, in many ways, still in play.

The Broads' collection plan sounds a lot like what Samuel Kress did years ago in divvying up his old masters collection amongst 19 American museums and 23 American colleges and universities. Kress gave works from his collection broadly, as outright gifts. Broad is making his works broadly available via loan, a kind of Kress-meets-atheneum.

But here's the thing: If you take the Kress model and merge it with an atheneum model, what do you get? An art museum. (The Broad Art Foundation seemingly already has a stricter deaccessioning 'policy' than two boards on which Broad sits: LACMA and MoMA.) I think that the subtext to yesterday's news is that should the Broads want to create a "Broad Art Museum" somewhere in Los Angeles, much of the groundwork is in place. Will it happen in the next five years? Probably not: The Broads' camp is adamant that BCAM at LACMA is Priority No. 1. But after that: Who knows?

And more groundwork-laying is likely ahead. First, the director and chief curator of the Broad Art Foundation, Joanne Heyler, told me that the Broads will fund BAF with a traditional endowment model. (No dollar figures have been determined.) Next, the foundation has talked about finding a new home for BAF for a while now. "We have our lovely building in Santa Monica. I adore it. It has its challenges, of course," Heyler said. "We also have storage in four different locations all over the city, and none of it belongs to us. We're looking seriously at whether we can put our [operation] under one roof."

So if you want to put your collection under one roof, and you want to make the most work available to the broadest possible audience, and if you want to exhibit more art than LACMA can, why not just open the collection to the public as the Broad Art Museum and loan liberally from the collection to institutions around the country?

"The final decision is much further down the line, but that's a possibility," Heyler said. "It is not something that would be on any kind of scale what we're doing at BCAM in terms of physical space. At least in terms of exhibition space -- and probably not that big, period. BCAM is 74,000 square feet. But it's early days."

At which point I asked Heyler if Donald Fisher's proposed 55,000 square feet of exhibition space for the Contemporary Art Museum Presidio in San Francisco was more along the lines of what BAF could do.

"I think there's a really clear distinction between what we're talking about and what Don Fisher is planning to do -- that is a sort of stand-alone, formal museum," Heyler said. "Eli said in [a] statement that he's not planning to build any museum. That's not what we have in mind at the moment. But that's something that, obviously, have brought up to us and so it's been given some amount of thought. But it's not something we're planning on doing. We're truly very focused on BCAM, and the Broads have made an amazing contribution to LACMA, and they did that in order to support that particular institution and that's what we're focused on."

More later today...