L.A.'s Newest Temple To Art

The Guess brothers’ extensive private collection now can be seen in the city’s onetime largest home of the Masons, a mysterious all-male society that lured Hollywood’s most powerful.

- Gary Baum

In Disney’s 2004 action-adventure film National Treasure, Nicolas Cage plays a historian hunting for fortune hidden by Founding Fathers who were Freemasons, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. The baroque plot, with its allusions to far-reaching power across time and geography, plays into the public’s long running, conspiracy-minded fascination with the 300-year-old male secret society’s lore.

As it happens, Walt Disney himself was a Freemason. So were many of the founding fathers of the entertainment business, including Louis B. Mayer, Tom Mix and Cecil B. DeMille. When California membership peaked at 245,000 in the mid-1960s, L.A.’s nexus for the group, the Scottish Rite Masonic Temple, had just been erected on Wilshire Boulevard in tony Hancock Park. (It later was used as a location in National Treasure.)

Now the Scottish Rite Temple, which the Masons reluctantly sold in 1994 amid declining local membership (today there are roughly 60,000 brothers in the state), will be reborn May 25 as the Maurice and Paul Marciano Art Foundation, a cultural center showcasing the extensive private collection of the mogul brothers who created the Guess empire.

The 110,000-square foot property’s famed Millard Sheets murals have been restored, while white-hot art star Alex Israel, who works out of the Warner Bros. lot — Jack Warner was, natch, another Mason — has added his own mural in the lobby. It was Israel who suggested the property to the Marcianos. They’d been in search of a flexible public showcase for grand displays of their pedigreed 1,500-object collection, which includes pieces by Takashi Murakami, Sterling Ruby and Mike Kelley.