Family Puts Art on a Firm Foundation : Eli Broad Study and Research Facility in Santa Monica Celebrates First Year

The art crowd is expected to turn out in full force tonight for a private reception at the Eli Broad Family Foundation’s study and research facility in Santa Monica. Preceding the Wednesday night gala preview of ART/LA89 and attracting an international array of art aficionados who are

in town for the contemporary art fair, the Broad affair will celebrate an ending and a beginning for the foundation.

Marking the close of the foundation’s first year of operation in a handsomely refurbished old building, the reception will also open a powerful exhibition of social and political commentary in contemporary art.

Eli Broad, a home builder and financier, is founding chairman of the Museum of Contemporary Art and an art collector. He and his wife, Edythe, formed their family foundation five years ago, but it gained new visibility last December when it moved into a former telephone company switching station. The building, at 3355 Barnard Way, has 22,000 square feet of gallery space on four floors and in the basement.

The artfully refurbished facility looks like a museum--the very sort of “boutique museum” that has been roundly criticized as a symbol of private collectors’ egotism--but it functions as a lending library and study center for contemporary art. Admission to the facility is limited to art professionals, curators, writers, scholars, students and groups affiliated with museums.

According to reports issued by the foundation, 1989 has been a busy year:

The foundation bought 37 new works for its collection, which now totals 350 pieces. Among this year’s acquisitions are works by Ross Bleckner, Jonathan Borofsky, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman. The collection represents 90 artists, half of them in considerable depth.

More than 4,000 curators, writers, students and scholars and members of 60 museum-affiliated groups have visited the building in Santa Monica. These visitors saw about 135 works that were installed in the foundation’s inaugural exhibition.

Eighty museums and university galleries borrowed works from the foundation’s collection. They went on view around the world at such prestigious institutions as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., the Art Institute of Chicago, the Artist’s Union Hall of the Tretyakov Embankment in Moscow, Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, the National Gallery of Greece in Athens and La Foret Art Museum in Tokyo.

“We feel very good about doing what we set out to do this year,” Eli Broad said. “The foundation’s services will be needed even more next year than they were this year because more and more art is going into hiding.”

The new exhibition’s political and social theme arose from current events and the foundation’s collection, Broad said. About a third of the works in the collection contain political or social commentary. While they were created before the opening of the Berlin Wall and the Eastern European upheavals that continue to make news, these works address similar issues, so Broad decided to assemble a timely show from the collection.

Foundation curator Michele D. De Angelus has organized a diverse group of works, choosing several pieces--in some cases mini-exhibitions--by 14 artists. In the basement galleries are relatively small works that fit the building’s only low-ceilinged, relatively cramped spaces. Here we find Sue Coe’s paintings that address such issues as nuclear armament with fanatical force, along with photographer Cindy Sherman’s self-portraits that question sexual roles throughout history.

Each of the spacious upper floors presents large pieces--some occupying entire walls--and generally provides plenty of viewing room. Eight works by Anselm Kiefer on the first floor, for example, compose a satisfying sampling of work by the celebrated German artist whose retrospective was at the Museum of Contemporary Art last year. Three immense mixed-media paintings and five smaller gray works, combining photographs with such materials as crumpled lead and mistletoe, convey an agonized sense of loss and displacement in vast spaces.

Moving upstairs to the second floor, we see equivocal word-works. In a gallery of Barbara Kruger’s provocative photo-and-text pieces, one work asks: “If you’re so successful, why do you feel like a fake?” Another superimposes “Have me, feed me, hug me, love me, need me” on baby pictures. Adjacent darkened rooms contain displays of Jenny Holzer’s cryptic phrases that flicker across the walls in light-emitting diode signs or sit dead still, tombstone style, on stone benches.

On the third floor, Hans Haacke--the art world’s most consistently hard-hitting critic--is in fine form as he skewers art collector and advertising mogul Charles Saatchi’s public relations campaign for South Africa in a piece called “The Saatchi Collection (Simulations).” Meanwhile, Leon Golub’s washed-out, unstretched paintings document grim scenes of tyranny and Robert Morris presents dark morasses of skeletons and other flotsam. His paintings and fragmented, ornately carved frames seem to suck baroque leftovers of civilization down a toilet.

In another room, John Baldessari’s collage-like wall of guns, a rose, kissing couples and a bitten apple adds up to an elegy on war, peace and temptation.

Art takes to the streets on the fourth floor in a lively display of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s graffiti-style paintings, Keith Haring’s pictographs and John Ahearn’s realistic sculptures of black people. It’s an energetic assembly that teems with life, but it also bristles with the tension of urban stress. Vigor wrestles with despair while skeletons grin amid a parade of nervous doodles.

This exhibition is too spotty to be mistaken for a museum survey of contemporary social and political commentary, but it reveals a surprisingly different face of the collection that debuted here last year. If you are not one of the favored few that the foundation admits to its premises, you may catch up with these works in coming years at other institutions.

The foundation’s stated purpose--and its practice this year--is “to serve the very real and immediate need of making contemporary art accessible to museums, art professionals, scholars, writers and the general public. The ‘lending library’ program enables the foundation to serve many institutions concurrently, thereby providing greater opportunities for the public to experience contemporary art.”