Open doors

EXPECTATIONS for the Broad, a vast new private museum in downtown Los Angeles, have been growing in the run-up to its opening on September 20th. Eli and Edythe Broad, its patrons, are among America’s most prominent contemporary-art collectors. The Broad (it rhymes with “road”) is to be the permanent home for the 2,000 works they have amassed over nearly half a century.

As an architectural project, the museum’s nervously latticed exterior stands tentatively along Grand Avenue, a cultural corridor that has been willed into being largely through Mr Broad’s generosity. He helped found the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) across the street in 1979, then bailed it out when it ran into serious financial trouble in 2008. And he helped get Frank Gehry’s adjacent Walt Disney Concert Hall built when fund-raising stalled in the 1990s.

Having worked with a number of well-known architects, Mr Broad should have had the acumen to achieve greatness when he chose Diller Scofidio & Renfro, the firm that united the warring resident companies at the Lincoln Centre in New York and brought it back to life.

Elizabeth Diller’s team designed a skewed-grid exterior as a kind of monumental open-weave fabric—a “veil” softly draped over the primary display space. It sits atop the “vault”, a blob that stores the Broads’ collection. The firm has long experimented with ideas of voyeurism and exhibitionism, and the experience of the museum was supposed to be fluid and sexy. The veil is raised at the corners to disclose a glass-walled lobby, where biomorphic dark-grey surfaces rise and spread overhead like a surreal forest canopy. Those surfaces make visitors aware of the vault, which the Broads wanted to be made visible as an emblem of their liberal policy of lending to other institutions.

An escalator invites the visitor to ride upward 105 feet (32 metres), penetrating the mass of the vault in a tube-shaped tunnel. It bursts into the centre of a huge exhibition space to reveal the lurid hues of an oversized bunch of Jeff Koons tulips in front of an array of austere monumental paintings by Christopher Wool.

This triumphal arrival within the collection rivals any museum from the golden age of the 19th century. Skylights shaped to emulate the veil’s grid float like a benign cloudscape, bathing the art in light. Pathways into galleries open in different directions, allowing visitors to choose the order in which they view the art.

Joanne Heyler, the Broad’s founding director, has chosen more than 250 works, mainly paintings, and divided the floor into 20 ample spaces. The first exhibition of the collection is a chronological hit parade of American artists from Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as more recent works from elsewhere: Takashi Murakami’s long pictorial mural that was inspired by the Fukushima disaster and an emotionally charged cityscape in the process of obliteration, “Cairo” by Julie Mehretu, that dates from 2013.

Unfortunately the museum’s veil proved very difficult to build, and the exterior went from resembling a softly pliable openwork fabric to a squared-off box. The tactile feel of the original outside would have drawn the visitor into the sensuousness of the lobby. Now exterior and interior barely speak to each other.

In the earliest design, the veil would also have screened sun coming in through glass walls on all sides of the display space, creating better light, at the expense of a great deal of wall space. In the end, only the Grand Avenue side, wrapping two corners, opens to the daylight-puckered veil. Elegant as the lighting effect is, it forms a strongly patterned background that is uncongenial to any but the most assertive works, including a monumental table and chairs by Robert Therrien.

Some of America’s greatest museums have been made when great collectors and great architects clicked, from the Frick Collection in New York to the Menil Collection in Houston. Though it is a pleasurable place to view extraordinary art, the Broad is not in the same class.