COURTESY ARTIST AND HAUSER & WIRTH
The Hollywood Reporter writes today that the former Interscope Records CEO and Beats co-founder (alongside the producer Dr. Dre) Jimmy Iovine and his wife, the English model and actress Liberty Ross, have donated the massive Mark Bradford painting 150 Portrait Tone to the permanent collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The painting is almost 20 feet tall and is made up of text sourced from a Facebook video created by Diamond Reynolds made in the midst of the 2016 shooting of her boyfriend Philando Castile. The institution declined to comment on the monetary value of the painting, but in the past, Bradford works of similar scale have sold for roughly $3 million to $5 million at auction.
The piece originally went up for exhibition at LACMA last year. It was initially on temporary loan from Bradford’s gallery, Hauser & Wirth, but shortly after the painting’s installation, LACMA’s director, Michael Govan, and the gallery decided to find a buyer who would donate the painting to the museum’s permanent collection.
Iovine spent some time with the work in a quiet gallery during the museum’s 2017 Art + Film Gala, and later that night spent some time with the artist. Shortly after, a deal was struck. The article also mentions that Iovine and Ross recently commissioned a new work by Ed Ruscha, which updates his 1987 piece Our Flag to reflect our current tumultuous political era.
In the piece, Iovine, who started collecting around six years ago, compares the painting to a Picasso classic. “It’s Mark Bradford’s Guernica. I don’t think it’s crazy to compare it to a work like that. There’s a frustration and intensity about Guernica, which is about a war and an unfair bombing and you feel the screams of pain. In Mark’s painting, you also feel the screams of pain,” he said.