A new building for L.A. museum— now what?

LOS ANGELES — For museum watchers, the hoopla surrounding the opening of the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum last weekend has played like a circus sideshow, a strange distraction from what was supposed to be the main event — the debut of a spacious, Renzo Piano-designed addition to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). With its 60,000 square feet of gallery space, the building adjoins a dramatic new entrance plaza on Wilshire Boulevard where grand-scale art commissions by L.A. artists Chris Burden and Robert Irwin dominate the scene.

Yet much of the news coverage has swirled around business tycoon and philanthropist Eli Broad (pronounced "Brode"), vice-chair of the museum's board, who hired Piano and paid the $56 million cost of the building, leading many to assume he would also permanently furnish it with the huge contemporary art collection he and his wife have amassed. The bombshell struck in January, when Broad announced he would not be giving his art to LACMA. Instead, he plans to keep control of it in his private foundation and loan it to various museums as he sees fit. The timing was brutal. A New York Times banner headline summed it up acerbically: "To Have and Give Not." Ouch.

I've been wondering: Since Broad planned to hold on to his collection, what was the rush about putting up a new building?

Impressive space, art

Well, it's there now, so let's look inside. Anybody who hires Renzo Piano to design a museum is probably betting on the glowing, commodious galleries he made his name on — most notably the Menil Collection museum in Houston — and in that respect the Broad Museum is a winner. Visitors enter on the third floor after riding up a tomato-red exterior escalator that slashes up the side of the building to join with a fire-escape style stairway that crisscrosses back down, offering lovely views of the surrounding park and distant mountains. Inside, the high ceilings and comfortable spaces open up through scrims and a saw-toothed roof to slits of blue sky and a soothing wash of indirect sunlight that makes everything shine. It feels good inside this building, and the proportions of the top two floors suit the large scale of the artworks, most on loan from the Broads.

In art collecting as in architecture, the Broads took a well-worn path, meaning that much of what's on view is no surprise. Seattle audiences will be familiar with some pieces that repeat here in local collections: an Andy Warhol "Rorschach" painting, a Jeff Koons "John the Baptist," Cindy Sherman's untitled photograph of herself in the biblical role of Judith (there is a whole gallery packed with Sherman photos) and a lineup of blue-chip 20th-century artists whose work is considered de rigueur: Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Ellsworth Kelly, Jean-Michel Basquiat. The difference is that Broad has the money and the clout to collect each of his anointed artists in bulk. So whereas here we may see an example or two of a particular artist's work, this show offers a more encompassing selection, with cluster retrospectives that help us understand what an artist is about. That includes a number of top L.A. locals — John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, Chris Burden.

Some classics of post-WWII art stand out. A nice selection of Lichtensteins, with nods to Japanese prints, Impressionism and comic books, looks absolutely fresh and gorgeous. Rauschenberg's gutsy "Untitled (Red Painting)" still resonates. A couple small 1962 Warhol soup-can paintings look stunning, especially the "Small Torn Campbell's Soup Can (Pepper Pot)" revealing the artist's pencil marks and elegant hand with paint.

Places of honor go to Jeff Koons, with some 16 major pieces prominently displayed, and Damien Hirst (of shark in formaldehyde fame) with three major installations as well as a number of collage paintings and the rather daunting sheep dip "Away from the Flock." A lamb standing afloat in a glass tank of formaldehyde, it holds a certain stomach-unsettling fascination that probably has little to do with art. A vague chemical aroma wafts around it, too — ick. Koons' work looks clever, exquisitely constructed and utterly soulless. Hirst, whose rise to fame in the 1990s as a "Young British Artist" was meteoric, seems just plain over-promoted.

Somehow contemporary art has gotten stuck in the notion that it has to be big to be important. L.A. artist Robert Therrien gets a laugh out of that idea by playing with scale in an Alice-in-Wonderland-huge table and chairs that leaves you feeling like you swallowed the small-pill. You can easily walk underneath it, a child again, examining the perfections of its illusionistic construction. And talk about big: The first floor galleries brim with an enormous installation by Richard Serra, the must-have sculptor of the day. The looming physicality of the massive, tilted steel curves had some people walking at an angle, their internal compasses thrown off by the unsteady lines. I must say, it is exhilarating to trace the spiraling path through the artworks and experience closeness to something that gigantic ("Band," in one gallery, measures roughly 13 by 70 by 36 feet) confined inside walls. But for my taste, the ceiling height on this floor was too confining, with the light fixtures jutting just above the top of the sculptures, and made the whole thing feel a bit squished.

Too much too fast

That's what's inside. From the outside, the BMCA is not as easy to love. Its two imposing, symmetrical travertine marble boxes are joined by a central glass core (with a bedroom-sized elevator) and that jazzy adjunct of red steel escalator and stairway. For me, the materials sit together uneasily, a mix of factory and palace aesthetics that I get intellectually but still find disconcerting. The stark walls of Piano's building are energized by Robert Irwin's playful grid of palm trees around the perimeter and the echoing shapes of Chris Burden's "Urban Light" on the plaza, a jungle of multitiered antique streetlamps. The blank, Wilshire Boulevard-side of Piano's building is almost completely covered with huge banners designed by Baldessari. Without them, the museum's street presence may feel pretty cold-shoulder.

The next phase of LACMA's expansion, also by Piano, includes a new special exhibition gallery and a remodel of the West building (the old May Company) with its administrative offices. Phase 3, as yet up in the air, will include "re-envisioning and possibly rehabilitating or replacing the buildings on the eastern portion of the [25-acre] campus."

Which brings us back to the big question: Why did LACMA need a new contemporary art museum in such a rush? The city already has the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), with three locations devoted to art after 1940 (Broad is founding chair and a lifetime trustee.) LACMA's sprawling campus now includes seven eccentric buildings. Shouldn't its leaders figure out the museum's vision and campus plan before forging ahead with more? With its encyclopedic collections and a special focus on Asian art, particularly from Korea, LACMA has a history of power struggles, clashing egos and shapeshifting identity. At least twice before, it has been publicly courted by big collectors (Armand Hammer and Norton Simon) only to have the tycoons keep their art and open their own museums. In 2002 a total redesign of the campus by Rem Koolhaas was scrapped for lack of funding. In 2004 the board approved a new overall plan by Piano, but only part of it is still on at this point, a spokeswoman said. For a textbook case of the issues art museums around the country are grappling with, LACMA has it all, writ large.

Director and CEO Michael Govan took over the complicated situation in 2006, with the expansion in midstream and leadership at issue. Smart, handsome and usually described as "charismatic," Govan successfully revitalized the troubled Dia Foundation in New York before accepting the challenge of helping LACMA consolidate its rambling ambitions and pep up its image. (He has since been named as a possible dark-horse candidate to take over as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the retirement of Philippe de Montebello.) Museum watchers will have their eyes on Govan to see if and how he manages to pull things together at LACMA.

The biggest question he will have to answer: Who is this museum meant to serve? The public or its patrons?

Sheila Farr: sfarr@seattletimes.com