Broad's impact as collector felt in contemporary market. (Up Front).

Billionaire Eli Broad wasn't on the Christie's sales floor one night last month when he bought an Andy Warhol "Dance Diagram" for $2.25 million, and Sam Francis's s "Big Orange" for $2.7 million. But his presence was felt.

His purchases were two of the Top 10 items sold, during what Christopher Burge, the evening's auctioneer, said was Christie's most profitable sale of 2003. Broad made his bids through his Manhattan art dealer, Larry Gagosian, by cell phone.

As one of the most active purchasers of contemporary art in the United States, Broad, who spends about $25 million a year on artwork, helps stabilize the market and keeps other buyers bidding.

"People take him as an indicator of the market, a leader of the market," said Tobias Meyer, who heads the contemporary-art department at Sotheby's Holdings Inc. "If a big player like that is buying, then the market is safe."

Broad is on a short list of financier art collectors, such as DreamWorks SKG cofounder David Geffen and Conde Nast Publications Inc. Chairman S.I. Newhouse, who have recently made contemporary and postwar art one of the most competitive and lucrative segments of the art market.

During the biannual auctions in New York last month and in November, sales of artwork created after 1945 for the first time overtook or matched results of auctions of Impressionist and Modem art.

Broad, who just turned 70, has a net worth of $5.9 billion, according to the Business Journal's most recent estimate.

Pop, abstract

The Los Angeles-based collector has put together an art trove that curators and dealers estimate at $500 million, a figure Broad says is about right. His collection includes work by about 175 artists and is dominated by Pop artists Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, abstract pieces by Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly and work by 1980s artists such as Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

In March, he made one of his frequent trips to New York to attend museums and visit galleries and gave a reporter a brief tour of the art in his Manhattan pied-a-terre, a penthouse apartment in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel on Fifth Avenue.

There was a Bryan Hunt sculpture of a silver zeppelin, the Hindenburg, fastened to a model of the Empire State Building, paintings by Francis and by Richard Artschwager, and a 6-by-4 foot 1969 Pablo Picasso portrait, "Arlequin Au Baton."

His best works are in his primary residence, a 10,000-square-foot hillside home designed by Frank Gehry on four acres in Brentwood. Or else they are in his beach house in Malibu, designed by Richard Meier. Some are also on display at the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain, as part of an exhibition of some 100 works by 20 artists, "Jasper Johns to Jeff Koons: Four Decades of Art from the Broad Collections," which has toured U.S. museums since 2001.

Among his favorites are Lichtenstein's 1962 cartoon image of a tank, "Live Ammo (Blang!)"; a 3.5-foot stainless steel "Rabbit," resembling a balloon bunny, by Koons in 1986; and a 1982 oil painting covered in straw by Anselm Kiefer, "Nurnberg."

He continues to expand his collection and has recently focused on postwar art.

His buying philosophy is simple: buy what's available. "You can't go out there and say, `I want to build a collection of Impressionist work or even post-Impressionist work,' it's almost impossible to do," Broad said.

Meyer, of Sotheby's, said Broad is among a number of collectors who have turned to postwar art and have helped push up prices.

"The Impressionist market rarely supplies great quality anymore," he said. "So clearly, if a man of these resources starts to focus on postwar art, it drives the market to a level that starts to compete with the level of impressionist and Modern art."

Broad's buying may be an indication that the market is healthy, although his choices don't necessarily influence what other people buy, said Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight.

"What Eli buys this year has no effect on what other people buy or what's being shown," agreed Gary Kornblau, editor of Art Issues Press, a publisher of art criticism. "There are collectors who, by their passion, create a certain rippling effect on the art world, such as Charles Saatchi. That was a collector, who, by his collecting, changed the art world. Eli doesn't do that."

The reason Broad's collection is less influential, said Knight, is that he tends to buy work by artists who are already accepted in the marketplace. "There's a lot of first-rate work in the Broad collection, but I don't think it's a very adventurous collection or an enlightening or illuminating collection," he said.

Buying in depth

What's unusual about Broad's approach is the volume of works he collects by certain artists, said Richard Polsky, author of a book about the market for contemporary art, "I Bought Andy Warhol" (Abrams, 2003).

"Geffen and Newhouse buy each of the big names," Polsky said. "Geffen is someone who bought relatively little art and everything he has is a masterpiece. There's more depth to Eli's collection. He stuck with his favorites. If he likes something, he really buys in depth."

In the 1980s, for example, while Broad was frequenting galleries in Manhattan's SoHo, he became impressed with a young photographer named Cindy Sherman who, in 1977, began shooting "Untitled Film Stills," a series of photographs that resemble publicity shots from Hollywood movies. Each image is a self-portrait, however, with Sherman posed as characters, such as a starlet or librarian.

Broad began collecting her work more than 20 years ago, and now owns at least 110 Sherman photographs, the world's most extensive collection, said Joanne Heyler, Broad's chief curator.

Broad's wife Edythe introduced him to painting. When they traveled, she stopped in galleries and bought prints. In 1972, she decided she "wanted to buy something of quality," according to the catalogue for the touring exhibition of their collection, and suggested to Eli that they buy an 1888 Vincent van Gogh drawing. It cost $95,000.

In the 1980s, on the advice of a few friends, Broad started to become more interested in contemporary art. He sold the Van Gogh so that he could buy a 1954 abstract painting by Robert Rauschenberg at auction. The piece, "Untitled (Red Painting)," is still among his most noted purchases.

While attending auctions during the art boom of the 1980s, he began to notice a trend that disturbed him. "A lot of the art that was being bought was going into foreign collections and it wasn't available for the public to see here," he said. In response, he founded the Broad Art Foundation in 1984, to buy paintings and sculptures by primarily American artists. His idea was to create a "lending library" so that museums and universities could have access to his collection.

Some of his detractors say Broad isn't quite as generous with living artists as he might be. "Eli doesn't understand that he has the clout to establish a new artist's career," said Knight. "He waits until an artist is established and then buys up their work. That's not collecting; it's shopping."

Broad dismisses such concerns, saying that his foundation has purchased the work of many emerging California artists, and helped exhibit them all over the world. Now, he's planning his greatest philanthropic effort yet: deciding where to place his art collection once he's gone. Neither of his two investor sons, Jeffrey, 47, or Gary, 44, are particularly interested in art, he said. Instead, he intends to leave the collection to "one or several" cultural institutions.