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Eli Broad, the construction and insurance magnate who was founding chairman of MOCA, has three distinct collections (one corporate, one private and the third, the Eli Broad Family Foundation, specializing in loans to museums) and retains a public relations firm to keep them, and him, as visible as can be. There is a persistent rumor in Los Angeles art circles that Broad is waiting for MOCA's operating funds for the T.C. to run out so that he can take it over as his own museum. Koshalek flatly denies that this is in the cards. "The leadership of this board, let alone the city, will never let the Temporary Contemporary go," he says. Nor should they: the discourse between MOCA's two buildings, the spare, rather grand abruptness of Gehry's renovated warehouse contrasted with the hyperrefinement of Isozaki's sunken museum, gives the museum a special flexibility of response to the display needs of today's art. The T.C. should be kept at all costs.
The new wing of LACMA comes nowhere near MOCA's ensemble in architectural quality. It is hampered by its relationship -- or lack of one -- to the existing buildings. These were probably the worst of any large museum in America, a mincing trio of pseudomodernist boxes completed in 1964 by Los Angeles Architect William Pereira. When the time came, in 1981, to expand LACMA, the proper response to them would have been the bulldozer. But that would have meant closing the museum. So its trustees engaged Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, a New York firm with a name for brash, virile signature buildings heavily layered with industrial metaphor, to design a new wing. The goals were to house LACMA's modern and contemporary collections and shows, separating them from its other collections; to provide 50,000 sq. ft. of new exhibition space, more storage room and new offices; and, if possible, to mask Pereira's unloved buildings.
Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer did not merely rise to this challenge. The new wing, named for its principal donor, Robert O. Anderson, former chairman of the board and CEO of Arco, has obliterated the old museum like the giant foot in Monty Python. What was once the museum's forecourt is now filled with a stepped facade some 300 feet long and, at its highest, 100 feet tall: a blind screen of yellow limestone, horizontal bands of green ceramic and patches of glass block, with a gargantuan rectangular entrance portal. The architects have so overdone their contextual homage to Hollywood Deco-Babylon that the effect verges on camp. Once inside, things recover: the galleries are large, well proportioned and properly lit, and LACMA's collection of 20th century art -- already the best on the West Coast -- has been enlarged in the past few years with some distinguished purchases and gifts, particularly in the areas of cubism and German expressionism. Furthermore, the first show in the Anderson building, an extensive anthology by LACMA's senior curator of 20th century art, Maurice Tuchman, titled The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985 (see box), breaks new ground in the study of abstract art.