“Anything that makes Lacma more of a centerpiece of L.A.’s cultural life is a great thing, and this is a real milestone in its development as an encyclopedic museum," said Elizabeth H. Ondaatje, a former RAND Corporation researcher and an author of its 2007 report “A Vision for the Arts in Los Angeles.” “The challenge now is that it needs to get up to the next level.”
The quandary faced by the museum in both celebrating and exhibiting its independence from a prominent donor is evident when its charismatic director, Michael Govan, who took over in 2006, dismisses the importance of Mr. Broad’s decision while simultaneously admitting that he hopes he will relent to some degree.
“He has 2,000 works, so there’s plenty to go around,” Mr. Govan said recently. Both he and Mr. Broad (whose name rhymes with road) say the museum still has first choice of the most desirable pieces in Mr. Broad’s art trove: works by luminaries like Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg.
And on a recent tour of the new building, Mr. Govan also revealed his continued hope that once Mr. Broad and his wife, Edythe, see the public’s reaction to the completed addition, they will turn their current loans to the new building into permanent gifts.
“This is the first step, I think,” he said.
Mr. Govan acknowledges that the museum’s identity as encyclopedic has shifted in recent years, particularly since Mr. Broad’s largess put contemporary art at the center of its geography. While it is most often described as a comprehensive museum in the vein of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, it enjoys depth in certain areas — Korean art, for example — yet has limited resources in others.
“It was never contemplated that contemporary art would be such a strong center of the museum,” Mr. Govan said. “It has added immeasurably to the identity of the institution as well as to its collection.”
That devotion to contemporary art is destined only to grow under Mr. Govan. The museum’s plans for a second and third phase of its transformation call for contemporary outdoor sculptures to dominate the grounds, with a proposed sculpture of a locomotive by Mr. Koons suspended from a crane high above the entrance.
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