David E. Bright

David E. Bright was an industrialist, patron of the arts, and collector of modern art. In the 1950s and 1960s, Bright assembled a collection of 125 paintings and forty sculptures with two major areas of focus: early twentieth-century European modern art (including works by Jean Dubuffet, Juan Gris, Vassily Kandinsky, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Amadeo Modigliani, and Pablo Picasso) and post-war American art (with examples by Adolph Gottlieb, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko). In 1967, Bright’s wife donated twenty-three works from his collection to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), which at the time represented the largest gift in the museum’s history.

Bright moved from Duluth to Chicago as a young man, where he began his career in the sales department of General Motors Radio Division. He rose quickly in rank, becoming head of his department in 1933. After leaving General Motors, he established his own electronics company, initially named the Pioneer Gen-E Motor Corporation. In the 1940s Bright’s company became the H&B American Corporation, at that time the largest operator of community antenna television systems in the United States. Through his entrepreneurial pursuits, Bright amassed a significant fortune, which would later fund his activities as collector and patron of the arts. In 1945 he married Dolly Bright Silliman (neé Newmire), a dancer from Los Angeles, who starred in a number of MGM films.

In Los Angeles, Bright became involved in a number of cultural organizations and began assembling his collection. Although the exact circumstances are not well documented, Bright acquired artworks through private dealers and galleries in the United States and Europe. These included Arthur Tooth and Son, Berggruen & Cie, Constant Wormser, Galérie Louis Carré, Galérie Rosengart, M. Knoedler & Co., Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, Pierre Matisse Gallery, Richard Feigen Gallery, Rose Fried Gallery, Paul Rosenberg & Co, and Sidney Janis Gallery.

By the mid-1960s, Bright’s collection of European modern art boasted such works as Gris’s L’Arléquin assis (Seated Harlequin; 1920); Kandinsky’s Semicircle (1927); Léger’s Les disques (The Disks, 1918–19), Femme devant la fenêtre (Woman in Front of the Window, 1923), and Composition aux sujets (Composition of Subjects; 1930); Matisse’s Still Life (1922–23); Miró’s Formes animées (Animated Forms; 1935); Modigliani’s La chocolatière (The Chocolatier; 1917); and Picasso’s Le peintre Sebastian Juñer (Portrait of Sebastian Juñer Vidal; 1903) and Jeune femme en robe rayée (Young Woman in Striped Dress; 1949); among others. His holdings of American art included Gottlieb’s Rolling III (1961); Ellsworth Kelly’s Blue Curve III (1972) and Curve XV (1975); Willem de Kooning’s Woman (1952); Pollock’s Black and White Number 20 (1951); and Rothko’s White Center (1957). These and other works were part of the 1967 donation to LACMA, where they are still housed today.

In 1958, working with the University of California Los Angeles, Bright established the David E. Bright Foundation. In addition to its charitable contributions to Los Angeles-based civic, cultural, and educational institutions, the foundation funded five awards for emerging artists at the Venice Biennale in the categories of painting, sculpture, and the graphic arts; in the process, Bright became the first American to sponsor an award at the Biennale.

Bright also supported the arts through his membership on the boards of various institutions, including the Art Council of the University of California, LACMA, the Los Angeles Music Center, and the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art. In the early 1960s, Bright became a trustee, treasurer, and chairman of LACMA’s building committee. In the latter role, he was instrumental in the planning and construction of the first buildings on the museum’s current campus on Wilshire Boulevard, which was inaugurated in 1965. In commemoration of the occasion, Mr. and Mrs. Bright purchased and donated Norbert Kricke’s Space Sculpture (1964; location unknown), which originally adorned the museum’s entrance and was later deaccessioned.