How L.A. Won Warhol

Behind-the-Scenes Moves By Power Elite Bring Acclaimed Exhibit to Town

By MICHAEL STREMFEL

Staff Reporter

It was a routine lunch at the posh Regency Club for billionaire Eli Broad and three of his art world colleagues. Broad and the curator of his foundation’s art collection, Joanne Heyler, were exchanging art news with Jeremy Strick, director of the L.A. Museum of Contemporary Art, and Audrey Irmas, chair of MOCA’s board at the time.

Then came chatter about the highly anticipated Andy Warhol exhibit in Berlin and then a notion by Heyler: What if the Warhol exhibit were brought to Los Angeles?

“Eli was talking to Jeremy about major contemporary artists who haven’t been shown in Los Angeles, and it sort of turned on a light bulb,” recalls Heyler.

From that lunch emerged a cultural coup nonpareil for Los Angeles, complete with a $130 million projected economic boost. After its two-month run at London’s Tate Museum beginning Feb. 4, the Warhol exhibit assembled by famed Berlin curator Heiner Bastian and described as the most significant retrospective ever assembled of Warhol’s work opens May 25 at MOCA, the sole North American venue.

“People from all over the United States will come see this show,” promised MOCA Chairman Bob Tuttle. “At least 50 percent of this collection is from European collections, some of which have not been seen in the United States since they were purchased.”

The exhibit comes amid a worldwide frenzy for anything Warhol. In recent months, the pop art icon’s pieces have sold at auction for four and five times their highest estimated values. “Warhol, 15 years after his death, has become the hottest commodity on the contemporary-art market,” proclaims an article in this month’s ArtNews magazine.

Broad concurs. “Warhol is becoming recognized as the most important artist of the last half of the 20th century due to the breadth of his talent and how it reflected the society of his time,” Broad said.

The opportunity has not been lost on L.A. tourism officials.

The Los Angeles Convention & Visitors Bureau has assembled a coalition of American Express, Amtrak, 10 L.A.-area hotels and airlines to sponsor a promotional campaign aimed at attracting out-of-towners to the exhibit. The city of L.A. is kicking in $250,000 to help cover expenses related to the exhibit.

Capturing the prize

So how did Los Angeles wind up as the only North American venue for one of the most highly regarded exhibits in years? According to those involved, it was a combination of fortuitous timing and powerful connections. The contemporary art world is a relatively small group and two of the heavier hitters Eli Broad and former L.A. councilman Joel Wachs, who is now chief executive of the Andy Warhol Foundation actively backed the L.A. effort.

“I made it very, very clear that the foundation, upon which many people rely, wants this to happen,” Wachs said.

The story really goes back two years when Bastian wanted to borrow several of Broad’s 12 Warhols for his 2001 Berlin exhibit. At the time, Broad’s Warhols had been committed to the “Johns to Koons” exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, but Bastian pressed for at least one piece that he considered crucial to the Berlin retrospective. It is one of the paintings from Warhol’s “Most Wanted Men” series.

“I saw the core pictures of my exhibit as being Warhol’s first five paintings, which New York galleries had refused to show,” explained Bastian, who was in Los Angeles last week to meet with MOCA officials. (Warhol wound up putting them up in a Bonwit Teller display window in April 1961.)

“I discussed it with Eli, and we both agreed we had to lend that one work to Heiner,” Heyler said. The “Most Wanted Men” deal was struck in December 2000.

A few months later, Bastian began approaching his Warhol lenders about extending the exhibit, taking their works to the Tate Museum in London. That included Broad, who, through Heyler, was negotiating with Bastian about moving his “Most Wanted Men” painting to London. That connection might have made it easier to float the idea of extending the show to Los Angeles on relatively short notice.

A couple of days after the Regency Club luncheon, Heyler had lunch with MOCA’s chief curator Paul Schimmel, who expressed interest in pursuing the Warhol exhibit for the spring of 2002 even though major exhibits typically are prescheduled two to three years in advance. “(Schimmel) said, ‘Anything that you and Eli can do to help us make that happen, we would welcome it,'” Heyler recalled.

Quick turnaround

Bastian’s initial reaction was cool.

“A third venue is always a problem,” Bastian now says. “After a certain time, lenders want their works back. And when pieces start falling out, the exhibit suffers.”

But Bastian did not refuse outright. Stirred by that glimmer of interest, Strick zeroed in on four selling points.

First, Bastian was familiar with MOCA. In the early 1990s, he had staged an exhibit of American artist Cy Twombly’s works at the downtown L.A. facility. Second, Bastian wants to maintain the scholarly tone of his retrospective on Warhol, who has been trivialized in the past. Strick, a respected art scholar, would ensure such treatment. Third, no Warhol retrospective had been staged in Los Angeles since the artist’s death in 1987, while a major Warhol retrospective had been staged at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1988-89. (The last Warhol one-man show here was in 1970 at the Pasadena Art Museum, predecessor to the Norton Simon Museum.)

And fourth, Warhol had close ties to Hollywood. Warhol’s first one-man show was held in 1962 at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, where he displayed his now-famous Campbell’s soup can paintings.

Bastian was steadily warming to the idea. Then another player joined the campaign Wachs, who took over as head of the Andy Warhol Foundation on Oct. 1.

“From the day I started here, I was strongly advocating for that to happen,” Wachs said. “Andy Warhol had a strong relationship to Los Angeles, and I can’t think of a more appropriate place for the retrospective.”

Getting some movement

But it wasn’t until Strick flew to Berlin on Nov. 4, to see the exhibit for himself, that things started to gel.

“Jeremy called me and said, ‘I think we have a chance to get this show. Should I go to Berlin to see it?'” recalled Bob Tuttle, MOCA’s board chairman. “I’m a car dealer, you know, so I said, ‘Don’t come back without the order.'” (Tuttle is managing partner of Tuttle-Click Automotive Group.)

Strick’s visit got Bastian motivated enough to approach the Warhol lenders, again this time to ask for permission to fly their artworks across the Atlantic. The strategy was to get approval from a couple of key lenders, such as European health care magnate Dr. Erich Marx, and then hope the others would follow. “I talked to Dr. Marx, and he said, ‘If you do this, you can have all 18 Warhol paintings of mine,'” said Bastian.

Other big fish were personally landed by Broad.

“We went to work on some of the lenders, including Peter Brant, a friend of mine who lives in Connecticut,” Broad said. “He has 38 (Warhol) pieces in the Berlin and London shows, and agreed to extend that loan to the Los Angeles venue.”

As expected, most of the lenders followed the lead of Broad, Marx, and Brant, a newsprint manufacturing executive.

Next, the focus turned to money. Crating and shipping close to 200 Warhol artworks to Los Angeles, along with installation and insurance, would cost around $2 million. Broad promised to kick in $250,000, but that left a huge gap. At Tuttle’s first MOCA board meeting as chairman on Nov. 15, the trustees were told of the opportunity.

“They were extremely generous and extremely enthusiastic,” Tuttle said. “They are all serious collectors themselves, and realize what this can do for the museum.”

After the well-heeled trustees and other private donors wrote personal checks, a gap of about $250,000 remained. So MOCA trustee Doug Ring, a real estate developer and husband of L.A. City Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski, was enlisted to ask the city to make up the shortfall.

“As a former lobbyist, or legislative advocate, or whatever the polite term is, I know lots of people at City Hall,” Ring said. “This is a very small town, and they are comfortable talking to me.”

Among those he contacted was Joy Chen, the city’s director of economic recovery and herself a former developer. She, along with Deputy Mayor Tim McOsker and other City Hall staff members, initially investigated getting funds from the Community Redevelopment Agency, which requires developers to set aside 1 percent of their project costs for public arts funding.

But it turns out the Warhol exhibit, even though MOCA is located within the downtown redevelopment area, is “not an appropriate use of those funds,” Chen said.

Pay dirt was struck at the Cultural Affairs Department. “We identified in excess of $250,000 that had built up over the years, grant funding that hadn’t been used yet,” Chen said.

And now, a corporate sponsor is being sought to ensure a cash cushion to cover unexpected costs. Broad said he is negotiating with “a major financial institution” to be the show’s exclusive sponsor. “We will get a corporate sponsor in the next couple weeks, whether it is this one or another,” he said.

The sponsorship fee “might be as high as $500,000,” Broad estimated.

That would be half the $1 million that Washington Mutual Inc. shelled out to be the exclusive sponsor of LACMA’s Van Gogh exhibit in 1999. But economic times are far leaner now. And a $500,000 sponsorship would be just about enough to cover the cost of insuring the Warhol works.

“Insurance costs have skyrocketed since Sept. 11,” Broad said. “But I’m still a director of American International Group, the largest insurer in the world. So I will endeavor to help get that cost down.”

In art and business, connections matter.