Change of heart, change of fortune

The news this week that billionaire art collector Eli Broad has decided not to give any of his 2,000-piece collection to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where a building bearing his name will open with great fanfare next month, was sort of like hearing that a terminal patient died. You know in your heart it's coming, but expectation does nothing to minimize being nonplused when it does.

Sometimes reality's bluntness does that. Overnight, LACMA became the museum equivalent of Hillary Rodham Clinton. After a buoyant year and a half, the air suddenly went out of the souffle.

Following Iowa's abrupt collapse, Sen. Clinton rebounded somewhat in New Hampshire. Whether LACMA can too is hard to say.

Why? Because the reinvigoration of the long-sluggish museum has been built around advancing a unique idea: LACMA was poised to become the nation's only encyclopedic museum -- with collections ranging through all historical periods in every part of the globe -- that would also have a major commitment to contemporary art. Since Broad, a LACMA trustee who occupies the stratosphere of the world's contemporary collectors, won't himself make the institutional pledge, that scheme has disintegrated.

Furthermore, if Broad, 73, won't give masterpieces to his own favored museum, why should any other private art collector? Especially not when any gift would be to something called the Broad Contemporary Art Museum.

When LACMA officials announced several years ago that Broad had pledged $50 million to build BCAM on its Wilshire Boulevard campus, his large collection was in the front of the art world's collective mind. LACMA may be encyclopedic, but its strengths have never been in the modern sweep of 19th and 20th century art. For art after 1950, a Broad gift could make a huge difference.

But the reality is this: The philanthropist has a track record as a hugely successful businessman who exchanges project involvement for near-absolute control. Letting go is the single hardest thing for a controlling personality to do.

Apparently, it's impossible to give away art from his two collections -- one personal, numbering about 400 works, now to be merged with an additional 1,600 held in a foundation, with all the attendant personal tax benefits but no loss of power.

Commitment phobia is irrational, and listening to Broad's explanations for his brusque about-face is a plain illustration. In interviews, he cites two main reasons why he's pulling back, after signaling in recent years that his collections would be divided among several museums. Neither explanation makes much sense.