$60 million of momentum

It’s only a five-page memorandum of understanding, signed by Eli Broad, donor, and Andrea Rich, president and director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. And those signatures have been drying only since June 6, Broad’s 70th birthday.

But the Broad gift plans that surfaced this week amount to a pledge of $60 million or more. Although its key goal is the creation of a new contemporary art building, LACMA’s leaders are already imagining how this will change the shape of their institution.

Broad, a LACMA trustee since 1995, aims to bankroll -- at a cost of $50 million or more -- a new building for the museum’s collection of post-1945 art. Broad also plans to pump more than $10 million into a new fund for buying contemporary art and send at least 200 late-20th century works to LACMA from his personal or foundation collections on long-term loan.

“This is a unique moment in his life, his career and his relationship to LACMA,” said Rich, who took over as the museum’s top executive the same year Broad joined the board. “I think that his birthday probably did have something to do with it.”

Though museum officials have confirmed the memorandum’s main provisions, many details remain unsettled, and the institution still hadn’t put its news in writing for the public as of midday Friday. Nor had Broad, traveling in Europe, spoken publicly.

The new building, which would stand on now-open space along Wilshire Boulevard between LACMA West and Ogden Drive, is expected to measure about 70,000 square feet, substantially boosting the area the museum now earmarks for post-1945 art. That new square footage would add more than 15% to the 428,000 square feet now available on LACMA’s main campus. The LACMA West building, much of which sits idle, includes 281,000 square feet.

But Rich stressed that the gift will not change the institution’s encyclopedic emphasis, nor will the new building operate separately from the rest of the exhibition areas. Instead, she said, LACMA’s curators will rearrange exhibition areas into schemes that more closely match the museum’s recent curatorial reorganization into “centers” for art of the Americas; Asian art; European art; and modern and contemporary art.

As plans are now shaping up, Rich said, the museum’s Anderson Building, which now holds modern and contemporary art, will probably eventually house art of the Americas.

The Ahmanson Building, which holds permanent collection items from Chinese to Islamic to European, will likely hold European and modern art.

The Hammer Building and adjacent Japanese Pavilion stand as logical places for LACMA’s Asian works. And if further fund-raising bears fruit, Rich said, the LACMA West building could hold not only children’s programming but offices for most of the museum’s staff, exhibition space and additional programs as well.

At the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, director Neal Benezra called the gift “breathtaking news at a time when many museums have had to curtail or postpone building campaigns ....The Broad collections are of unquestioned quality and importance.”

At the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles -- an institution Broad helped found in the 1970s and ‘80s before forming a closer allegiance with LACMA in recent years -- director Jeremy Strick called Broad’s gesture “a remarkable gift -- one of the major gifts in the history of the city. And I think it’s a great thing for contemporary art in Los Angeles.”

Strick added that “major gifts of this sort tend to set the bar for other donors and can have an inspiring effect, and I suspect that’s an effect Eli is hoping for.”

For Rich, the gift is a chance to make “a better link between the east and west campus” of the museum, and to rearrange a 100,000-item collection among seven buildings.

It’s also a chance to regain momentum lost after museum leaders spent most of 2002 trying to sustain a $300-million raze-and-rebuild plan from Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas that major donors proved unwilling or unable to pay for.

Despite the enthusiasm she and the museum’s trustees had for that plan in 2001, Rich said, it became clear that “it was undoable, at least in my lifetime, because you couldn’t just bite off a piece of it. You had to do it all. We had to get a whole set of funders to put that money upfront. We tried, and Eli was there and solid as a rock,” Rich said. “But we just couldn’t do it ....So we went back to Plan A, to start with a link building, which could be done over time, without closing any of the existing buildings.”

In the months ahead, Broad will recommend an architect, subject to approval by LACMA’s board, which will also review designs.

Broad, who arrived in Southern California in the early 1960s and lives in Brentwood with his wife, Edythe, holds the titles of chairman at financial services company SunAmerica and founder-chairman at KB Home Corp. In addition to Eli and Edythe Broad’s personal art collection, the two have amassed hundreds of contemporary works via the Santa Monica-based Broad Art Foundation.

The LACMA complex opened in 1965 as a three-building campus, added a fourth in 1986, a fifth in 1988 and a sixth in 1998, when the museum acquired the former May Co. building now known as LACMA West. There were other additions and reconfigurations along the way, as well, yielding an architectural jumble that museum officials have conceded is a “disconnected and disorienting experience for the public.”

“Now, there’s a chance to rationalize it,” said Rich.

Rich said the talks began with the idea of a building, and Broad later came up with the plan’s acquisition funds and loans of artwork. As for the added costs of operating the new building, Rich said museum leaders will factor that in when they launch capital and endowment-building campaigns, probably in 2004.