Almost everything about a recent dinner at Eli Broad’s Los Angeles home in honor of the 40th anniversary of Art Basel was outsize, starting with the estate itself. Visitors approached the mansion—designed in part by Frank Gehry—through a private sculpture park, then entered a sitting room the size of a hotel lobby before descending a stairway into a series of double-height galleries. “This is bigger than the Gagosian Gallery,” said fashion-world fixture Richard Buckley as he arrived at the first subterranean white cube, with its cranelike Calder sculpture and pair of giant Chuck Close portraits. A moment later Ann Philbin, director of UCLA’s Hammer Museum, summed up the installation with a wry understatement: “Not bad,” she said, in a tone that meant something more like, Can you believe?
Throughout the residence, dozens of works stood out both for their historical importance (Jeff Koons’s Rabbit) and their giant scale (Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipse in the garden). The collection easily substantiated Broad’s reputation as the most powerful arts patron in Los Angeles.
The only diminutive presence on that balmy evening was Broad’s wife of 54 years, Edythe, who cheerfully received her dinner guests beside a billboard-size Anselm Kiefer. (A huge Warhol covered another wall, and a Piet Mondrian hung over the fireplace.) Mrs. Broad was apologizing for, of all things, the reduced number of works on view. Most of the collection, she explained, was on loan to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for display at—where else?—the Broad Contemporary Art Museum. “This is what’s left,” she said.
Still, such is the aura of the Broad brand that hardly anyone would say no to an invitation to dine with the couple at home. (Broad’s social drawing power has only been heightened by his controversial status as a double-edged donor: Even his admirers have to acknowledge his tendency to grandstand, and his $30 million pledge this past fall to rescue L.A.’s other big art museum—the ailing Museum of Contemporary Art downtown—sparked hot debate over whether the institution should marry itself off to such a domineering white knight.) The 130 guests included fellow megacollectors Michael Ovitz and Eugenio Lopez; art stars Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari and Franz West (in town for his LACMA retrospective); gallerists Shaun Caley Regen and Michael Kohn; and international playboy-collector Nicolas Berggruen.
The party was organized in part by Art Basel’s West Coast head of VIP relations, Lauren Taschen—wife of publisher and art collector Benedikt Taschen—and was intended as a sort of stimulus package to foster enthusiasm for what is widely considered the art world’s preeminent sales event. “For our purposes, it’s the best art fair,” said Edythe, sounding an opinion informed by some 20 years of shopping there. “It has the best material. It’s like art camp.”
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