Curator Helps Collector Create a Solid Foundation : Long gone are the days when Michele D. De Angelus and her husband postponed vacations for economic reasons. Now she postpones vacations because of her busy work for the Eli Board Family Foundation.

Eleven years ago Michele D. De Angelus was about to embark on an overdue honeymoon with her husband, ceramist Jim Rothrock, when the phone rang. The caller was yet another art collector seeking her services as a free-lance curator.

“We’re leaving for our honeymoon,” she said, “but let’s make an appointment for next . . .” She never finished the sentence. The caller suggested that they stop by his house on their way out of town and examine his private collection. He wouldn’t take no for an answer.

She didn’t know it then, but he was using corporate skills that had made him a millionaire and would soon make him a major player in the international art world.

“I didn’t realize how typical this was,” De Angelus said a decade later in her Santa Monica offices. “Do it now, never do it later, it should have been done yesterday, how quickly can we move on this? Very typical Eli.”

“Eli” is Eli Broad (pronounced “Brode”), the man who persuaded the bride to take a detour on her honeymoon. That brief stop led to a dramatic career shift for De Angelus. Now 38, Shelly, as her friends call her, no longer has time to free-lance. She has become the curator and guiding force of the Eli Broad Family Foundation, a nonprofit, art-lending organization situated in a handsomely converted telephone switching station in the Ocean Park district of Santa Monica.

Long gone are the poverty days when she and her husband postponed vacations for economic reasons. Now she postpones vacations because she’s too busy researching, curating and helping Edythe and Eli Broad acquire contemporary works by modern masters such as Anselm Kiefer, Robert Morris, Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Cindy Sherman, John Baldessari, Jenny Holzer and Leon Golub.

Chief executive of Kaufman & Broad, an international house-building company that he founded in 1957 (the largest of its type in California), the self-described “eclectic workaholic” was on the verge of breaking out of the relatively isolated role of the private collector.

He was already at work forming the new Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. He had an eye for potential--in art and in people.

Broad remembered their first meeting in his Brentwood home: “I was very impressed with her as an art historian and with her knowledge and museum background. At that time, we were looking simply for someone to catalogue our collection. She was clearly overqualified for that task. I was impressed with her curatorial skills. She had written on art, lectured, been involved in education. I considered her a highly capable curator who did not really enjoy working in a very institutional setting.”

At that initial meeting, De Angelus’ first impression of Broad was that he was “not a team player.” As she examined paintings and sculpture by Matisse, Van Gogh and Picasso, Broad spoke about his collecting ambitions and dreams. These included the creation of a lending foundation where scholars could view and study contemporary art.

“He was at the point where he’d gone from being a casual collector buying things to decorate walls in his house,” she remembered, “to a very serious, very avid collector who was much more experienced. I joined on at just that transition and it snowballed.”

But an evolution from part-time free-lance work for the private collection to curator of the Eli Broad Family Foundation is more than a snowball--it’s an avalanche. As Broad’s diverse art interests grew, so did De Angelus’ role. While he operated a business empire and served as first chairman of the founding group of the Museum of Contemporary Art, De Angelus began cataloguing the Broads’ personal art, curated and consulted for the growing corporate collection and gradually worked toward the creation of the foundation.

Broad’s relentless pace and voracious intellect are well-known in the corporate world.

“If I worked for Eli Broad,” David Carpenter, chairman and chief executive of Transamerica, once observed, “I’d sure want my facts straight before I walked into his office. You don’t buffalo him.”

Not many people would have given the then-27-year-old woman much of a chance of survival with a notorious perfectionist such as Eli Broad.

But De Angelus was well prepared for the task. She had learned the ropes in the professional art world in various positions, including a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio; as a researcher at the Whitney Museum in New York, where she worked on the “200 Years of American Sculpture” exhibit, among other things; and as an intern at the Smithsonian Institution and Yale University Art Gallery. She earned a master’s degree in art history and French at Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts, did postgraduate work at the University of Delaware and lectured at Delaware, the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art and UCLA Extension.

Stephanie Barron, curator of 20th-Century art for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, first recommended De Angelus to Broad. “Shelly has a very high and well-placed regard for herself, her intellect and her experience. I think she’s someone who’s not afraid to say what she thinks. My experience in dealing with people who are successful and often considered very demanding and difficult to deal with is that they often have a lot of respect for people who disagree with them, so long as it’s backed up by evidence.”

Lisa Lyons, director of art programs for the Santa Monica-based Lannan Foundation, described De Angelus as “an extremely adventurous, dedicated, passionate looker at contemporary art. She’s extremely knowledgeable about the entire field.”

“I’ll never forget the first time I went to San Francisco with him to look at galleries,” De Angelus recalled. “Midway through the day I thought either this guy has a lot more energy than I have or he has on really comfortable shoes. He’s really rapacious in his intellectual curiosity. He really does have a desire to make a difference in the world. He won’t undertake something if he cannot really do it significantly.”

But Broad is shrewd when it comes to hiring employees. He recognized in De Angelus another potential overachiever.

“I have the ability in whatever I do to get people to do more than they think they can do,” Broad said of their relationship. “Now she’s doing a whole lot more than she thought she could. We’ve both grown as a result of the relationship. I have no formal training in art history, and in some ways Shelly has been a teacher.”

Broad taught De Angelus by example, a talent he developed growing up in a family of rabbis and teachers. “I think Eli’s gift is for selecting really good people to work with and then bringing them along,” she said. “There are some people who can develop people really well, and if you’re one of the people who can hang in there you really grow and learn a lot under his tutelage and challenge and provocation.”

Even though Broad had an international reputation and De Angelus was a relative unknown in the art world, he valued her judgment.

“It’s very rare that he’d buy something I despise,” she said. “There are times when I push or challenge him. A lot of times Eli will play devil’s advocate. He’ll challenge you. You have to be very clear in your thinking about an artist.”

Her role expanded as Broad’s art ambitions grew. While helping to create MOCA, Broad was learning how difficult and expensive it is for museums to purchase contemporary works in an overheated art market. By the time an acquisition board voted to buy a new Schnabel or Salle, the price would have risen astronomically. But a private collector like Broad could purchase such works immediately upon their availability, and then loan them to the museum.

De Angelus said she told Broad: “Historically, the great collections formed for museums were not realized by a museum board. They were formed by a single individual, like Frick or like Mrs. Whitney or the various donors to the Chicago museum.”

In 1984, after five years as board chairman of MOCA, Broad stepped down and began aggressively building the foundation with De Angelus’ help.

“But the way in which Eli’s interests developed,” she said, “and the ways in which we’ve worked together have really grown in a very natural way. So it’s not as though there was this overwhelming concept of the foundation which I as an individual was called to implement. It really arose out of a natural interaction between us and a development of Eli’s interests and ideas and understanding about the way museums work.”

De Angelus’ role included serving as Broad’s art scout, traveling to New York and Europe in search of contemporary art. She met with curators and artists, went to galleries and studios. When free from his corporate duties, Broad would join her and examine firsthand the works De Angelus recommended.

“When I get there, we’ll spend a long day together looking at the various collections,” Broad said of his art trips to New York. “I like to make my own decisions but only after getting her views and judgment. She’s a very good adviser. We agree most of the time, but there are occasions when we have different views.”

“Often I will come to artists that he isn’t interested in or doesn’t know about,” she said. “Sometimes he’ll bring an artist’s work to my attention and say, ‘OK, I’m interested in this artist. What period or what paintings should we collect?’ Then I’ll research that. It’s a very dynamic relationship--there are certain artists he feels very strongly about and others I feel very strongly about. I tend to be interested in more conceptual, more minimalistic kinds of work. Eli really likes very traditional painting with an obvious social commentary.”

Specific guidelines were set for the foundation. Its collection would be comprised of work done only in the last quarter of the century. There would not be an attempt at a complete survey of modern art. Instead, artists whose work interested Broad and De Angelus would be given an in-depth representation.

“We’re focusing on a select number of artists,” De Angelus said, “but we’re buying their work over a period of time. I think this comes out of Eli’s belief that in a way the American audience for contemporary art is more sophisticated than people are thinking. In the 1960s that wasn’t true and museums needed to present these kinds of survey collections, what I call trophy collections--one elephant, one zebra, one antelope. The audiences got the overview, the general history of contemporary art postwar. What they need now is some really in-depth education about contemporary art. And museum collections in this country very rarely offer you that kind of in-depth look.”

Broad purchased a closed telephone switching station in Santa Monica to house the offices and offer exhibitions. The space is open only by appointment and only to art scholars, museum professionals, artists and writers.

De Angelus curated the inaugural exhibition in December, 1988. The collection is not meant to be a museum in perpetuity, both Broad and De Angelus hasten to add, but a resource for museums. At some point the collection will be given as a whole to an institution. “But not before the year 2000,” Broad added.

De Angelus’ role has expanded as the foundation has grown. Besides looking for art, she diplomatically negotiates the purchases. No longer is the ability to write a check the sole criteria.

“You have to cultivate the artist or the dealer,” she said, “get them to understand that the works will be well seen, that they’ll be available for loan. Cultivating an artist, cultivating a dealer, getting to know their body of work, getting to know what pieces are important.”

There’s considerable administrative work. Loan requests must be considered. Details of shipping and crating and insurance--a major responsibility in a rapidly changing market--require that De Angelus and her staff of four document every step of their work.

Growing along with the foundation, of course, is the relationship between the businessman Broad and the art historian De Angelus.

“Eli’s obviously very aware of the market, being a businessman,” she said. “That education in the market is something I’ve gotten from him. He often has very abstract thinking about fiscal matters, which is something that was new and very valuable to me. So I think it’s an interesting exchange. I’ve pushed him to things he might not have become interested in otherwise, and in other things he’s very insistent.”

That notorious insistence can occasionally make things difficult, De Angelus said.

“Eli’s constantly onto the next thing,” she said. “This has been somewhat tough on me because you’d sometimes kind of like him to say, ‘You’ve done a great job. This is wonderful.’ Well, obviously you’ve done a great job or you wouldn’t be still in the job. Instead it’s, ‘What’s the next thing that remains to be done, what are our next objectives?’ ”

So what gives De Angelus the strength to continue?

“In my humorous moments I think it’s because I had a very withholding father,” she said, laughing. “Since I don’t have it in my personal life I’ve re-created it in my job life. But, seriously, although we’re dissimilar as personalities, in certain ways Eli and I are similar. We’re perfectionists. We’re people who are intellectually inquiring, who need new information.”

De Angelus thinks back 11 years to that phone call and how it’s changed her life.

“I’ve really grown up under Eli’s tutelage. I’ve become a much more efficient sort of A-type personality under his prompting. Now I have a really amazing view of the art world that not many people get. . . . Edy and Eli believe they’re only caretakers for this art work, even the work they own personally. And we’re all privileged to be able to help the art maintain this life and move along.”

What about the Broads’ private collection that De Angelus was initially hired to catalogue?

“We never did catalogue the collection,” she said. “We got it organized, made documentary files, but it’s still going on.”