October 27, 2005 | Read Time: 3 minutes
Edward R. Broida, a retired real-estate developer in Malibu, Calif., has donated 174 pieces from his collection of contemporary artworks to the Museum of Modern Art, in New York. The gift includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints from 38 artists, among them Philip Guston, Vija Celmins, and Christopher Wilmarth.
While the museum does not release the value of acquisitions and has yet to conduct a full appraisal of the gift, a report in The New York Times cited a staff member who estimated the donation to be worth about $50-million.
Mr. Broida began building the collection in the late 1970s with the purchase of two paintings by Mr. Guston, a Canadian-born avant-garde painter. Then a novice collector, Mr. Broida focused on acquiring pieces that captured his imagination, regardless of whether they were popular with critics or other buyers.
“His is really a collection that reflects a particular taste,” says John Elderfield, the museum’s chief curator of painting and sculpture. “Some of the artists, like Celmins, were truly unknown. Her 1960s pictures hardly had a market when he bought them.”
Mr. Broida, 72, worked frequently with the dealer David McKee and also cultivated relationships with many of the artists whose work he acquired. Mr. Guston compared Mr. Broida’s patronage of contemporary artists with the relationships between Walter H. Annenberg, the philanthropist, and modernists such as Marcel Duchamp.
Trip to California
In the 1980s, Mr. Broida sought to construct a museum in New York to house his collection, but building problems and other concerns brought the plan to a halt. More recently, Mr. Broida’s ailing health led him to think urgently about planning his estate.
After speaking with Agnes Gund, a friend and member of the Museum of Modern Art’s board, Mr. Broida decided to give the institution first pick from his collection of approximately 700 works. While he intends to sell a few pieces to provide financial security to his children, the vast majority of the works will be donated to the Museum of Modern Art and to other museums.
In August, Mr. Broida invited Mr. Elderfield and a second Museum of Modern Art curator, Ann Temkin, to California to discuss what pieces the institution would receive. The three spent two days scrutinizing the list of works, eventually whittling it down to include those pieces that could best enhance the museum’s collection. The gift not only makes the museum the foremost collection of Guston, Celmins, and Wilmarth, it also adds to its collection groups of pieces by Jake Berthot, Mark di Suvero, Ken Price, Joel Shapiro, and John Walker.
Mr. Elderfield recently spent a Saturday morning with Mr. Broida at a warehouse in Queens, N.Y., unpacking pieces that have been arriving from storage from across the country. Several of the works were evacuated from Houston on the eve of Hurricane Rita.
“One of the works he’d never actually seen,” says Mr. Elderfield, “and others he hadn’t seen in years. He was just thrilled to bits.” The museum, he says, is working overtime unpacking and cataloging the items in order to exhibit the entire gift next summer.
