Eli Broad Wants His Own Museum in Beverly Hills

When you say you’re going to donate millions of dollars worth of art to a local museum and then suddenly pull out, it probably figures that you have ulterior motives. So it is with billionaire Eli Broad, who decided to stiff the Los Angeles County Museum of Art early this year by deciding to take back his promise to give them 2,000 pieces of high-value art (though, to be fair, he did help them raise a bunch of money to expand). Instead, he’s keeping it all to himself and has announced that he’d like to open a public museum in Beverly Hills to showcase his collection, to hopefully be built in the next few years and have hired architecture mega-firm Gensler to do the pre-planning. Here’s a bit:

“We want a new headquarters, a space to have works that are not on loan to others at any given moment available for study by curators and scholars,” [foundation director Joanne Heyler] said.

The scope and cost of the new facility will depend on the location that’s finally chosen, said Heyler, who declined to discuss talks with property owners. The foundation also hasn’t decided what to do with its headquarters and private museum in Santa Monica, overlooking the ocean.

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