A Love Affair With the Arts

In 1986, $60,000 would buy a car or two, a very nice diamond, or, if you were a newly divorced television executive with a restless intelligence and an adventurous spirit like Blake Byrne, it could buy you a starter collection of contemporary art.

Today, Byrne is a trustee of the Museum of Contemporary Art and, for the last four years, has appeared on ARTNews’ list of the 200 most important American collectors. As he sits in his West Hollywood living room and recalls his initiation into serious collecting, on every side of him the varied, edgy works he has acquired in the last 15 years are visible. Metal and neon sculptures dominate a deck. Large paintings cover most walls. A mixed-media piece, “Office Baroque” by Gordon Matta-Clarke, an artist who used real architectural elements to make conceptual works in the ‘70s, sits near the doorway to the kitchen. It is a piece of scavenged flooring that takes up actual floor space. In Byrne’s home, art is not just background.

“As a collector, Blake has great knowledge and real commitment,” says Jeremy Strick, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art. “He’s a great enthusiast.”

These same traits were already in evidence when Byrne started out collecting with a budget that he considered “a lot of money, in those days, to spend on art.” He traveled to the 1986 Basel Art Fair, an annual showplace in Switzerland for the works of emerging and established artists from all over the world; he covered the festival methodically, looking at hundreds of paintings, sculptures and drawings. He made note of artists who moved him and of works he’d like to own.

At the end of three days, he reviewed his list with New York dealer Jack Tilton, who had become a friend and mentor in the few years that Byrne had begun frequenting that city’s gallery scene. With Tilton’s advice, Byrne narrowed his list to less than a dozen pieces, looked again at all of those that remained unsold and sent home seven by an eclectic group of international artists that included Portuguese sculptor Juan Mun~oz, New Yorker Richard Tuttle and L.A.-based Tony Cragg, who uses found objects in his sculptures. They have all become much better known since they first caught Byrne’s eye.

Those seven purchases are now placed throughout his Minimalist 1960s home in the hills, with its spectacular view of Los Angeles beyond the glass-walled living room. On Memorial Day weekend last month, Byrne returned to L.A. from New York and slowly walked from room to room, looking at everything he’d missed while he had been gone, including the view of the city shrouded in morning clouds and family photographs that cover a tabletop at one end of the art-filled living room. Not long ago, he had moved an early Jackson Pollack drawing from one wall to another.

“I’d forgotten that I’d done that,” he said, “and I saw it and thought, ‘Oh, wow. Doesn’t it look wonderful there?’ ”

Byrne’s ever-growing collection is displayed here, as well as in his New York apartment near Carnegie Hall--where he spends about four weeks a year--and in a 2,500-square-foot apartment in Paris that he bought four years ago when he retired from the broadcasting business. He’s in his Left Bank apartment at least four months every year, to the delight of his constant companion, Watney, a charming mutt whose canine love interest is French.

“For a lot of people, collecting is about the chase and the hunt and filling up storage spaces,” Byrne says. “They buy things they may never see again. For me, it’s about living with art I’ve fallen in love with. The emotion has to be there if I’m going to buy something.”

What is most striking about those early pieces Byrne acquired is their audacity. One might expect a beginning collector to be attracted to works that are as instantly appealing as Watney. But the angular white sculpture in the entry by Swiss artist Martin Disler is hardly adorable. A stylized figure of a man fashioned of what could be papier ma^che or meringue, it appears anguished, as if fighting off some internal or external threat.

Byrne initially installed it in his house in Bedford, N.Y. The dining rooms walls there were lined with Audubon prints, artwork as traditional as most of the homes in that conservative suburb.

“I never looked at [the Disler] as being mean or nasty. To me, it was a warm, grotesque, childlike thing,” Byrne says. “When I got back from Basel, people came in and saw some of these things that I’d bought and thought I’d lost my mind,” he says, obviously relishing the memory. With his straight, gray hair, round face and hearty laugh, Byrne could pass for an underfed Friar Tuck; and like that legendary character, he clearly enjoys challenging the establishment.

Slightly critical of new collectors who buy from a shopping list of artistic brand names, Byrne has always been guided by that unmistakable stirring in the gut that signals love at first sight. And as his knowledge and experience have grown, his choices have become more cerebral. The art he surrounds himself with isn’t obviously pleasing or even inviting at first. An abstract by Rebecca Purdum, hanging behind the piano at one end of the living room, emits a dynamic warmth. A whirl of rust, it brings to mind earth and fiery metals and appears so textured that it seems more than two-dimensional. There is nothing else in the collection quite like it.

Byrne has learned that art doesn’t have to be pretty to be stimulating. A sculpture by Mun~oz, one of the pieces he bought on that first trip to Switzerland, now sits in his downstairs bedroom. It is a rectangular box made of pale wood, hinged and fastened like a standard toolbox. Inside, a phallic arm protrudes from one side. A rounder shape seems to strain toward it from the opposite side.

While moving into his Los Angeles home, Byrne found validation for his choice of the work from an unlikely source. Asking a mover to handle the box carefully because it was a work of art, the worker’s curiosity was piqued. Byrne opened the box.

“What in the world is that?” Byrne remembers the mover asking.

“What does it mean to you?” Byrne responded.

The mover looked for a minute, pointed at the shapes and said, “This looks like the man, and that’s the woman, and it looks like they had a fight, and they’re trying to get back together, and they’re stretching a little bit, but they’ve still got a ways to go. Am I right?”

“Absolutely,” Byrne told him, and as he tells the story again today, he relishes the memory.

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Every day, Byrne walks his dog, brushes his teeth, reads at least one newspaper and does something related to his art collecting. That might mean attending an auction, reading the art gossip sheet Bare Facts, then chatting with a friend about the news it conveys or studying transparencies of a new artist’s work. He regularly goes to Paris, London, Berlin, Cologne and New York to visit galleries; collecting influences his travel plans and is an important part of his social life.

Professional success, confidence and being a purchasing committee of one has allowed him to follow his heart. Until his retirement, Byrne was a partner in Argyle Communications, which owned TV stations from Hawaii to Rhode Island. Although he is close to his two grown children and dotes on his infant granddaughter, it is easy to imagine Byrne beginning life anew at 50 as a single man obsessed with art. The collection he and his former wife had amassed, as his career brought them from New York to Oregon, Rhode Island and Texas, remained with her.

After his divorce, he settled in New York and began exploring the world of contemporary art and building a new collection. He went to galleries and auctions often, collected art books and visited museums throughout the world. He learned to recognize artists who had their own vision and found that his instinctive aversion to decorative, commercial styles was worth trusting. In 1989, he moved to Los Angeles to be president and general manager of KCAL.

“When I was married, we’d buy local artists wherever we were living, and we’d pick things up when we traveled,” he says. “We never spent more than $2,000 on a piece, but we always bought original art. When we lived in Providence in the mid-’70s, our next-door neighbor was Bruce Helander, the dean of students at the Rhode Island School of Design and an artist. He was a major influence.”

In the mid-’80s, the art market was hot, fueled by an international class of newly rich collectors, powerful, hype-savvy dealers and a growing celebrity culture in which an artist’s colorful persona might get as much attention as his work. Influential galleries were pushing a substantial list of contemporary artists then, whose works sold for $10,000, $12,000, $25,000. Today, many of the same works are passing at auction for $5,000. Like many of his fellow collectors, Byrne has made some mistakes, although whether art retains or increases in value is not the only criteria he measures.

He says he’s made more than his share of lucky choices, including collecting Dutch artist Marlene Dumas, whose work focuses on the female figure, American psychological realist Eric Fischl and Mun~oz, years before their stars rose. Mun~oz is one whose work Byrne continues to buy and with whom he has forged a friendship. Byrne says he’d like to get to know more artists and has opportunities at gallery openings and at the small dinners that usually follow. But he finds that when he knows an artist, he’s not as objective about the work.

“I know several artists very well, and I’ve become totally convinced that their work is the best in the world,” Bryne says, laughing at how easily he can be positively or negatively influenced.

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In 1994, his wish list was led by painter Minimalist Agnes Martin, Neo-expressionist Jean-Michel Basquiat and late-Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell. He tells the story of buying all three the following year with the enthusiasm of a fisherman remembering the day he caught that monster marlin.

“I was at an auction in New York, and the art market was totally dead. Usually people stay till the very end, but a wonderful Basquiat from 1982 was the last piece in the auction, and about half the people had already left. I suddenly looked up and thought, ‘My god! That’s going for almost nothing.’ ”

Basquiat’s large, colorful canvas, “Donut Revenge,” dominates a wall near Byrne’s front door. A 1962 Joan Mitchell oil he bought in the same depressed market hangs over the living room fireplace. The Martin is kept in the L.A. office of his family foundation, and the trio have quadrupled in value.

“That’s very gratifying and exciting,” Byrne says, “and I don’t want to sell them. I do sell things off. I have to, in order to keep buying. But living with art is not buying something and selling it when it’s worth more. It’s getting up in the morning and looking at your art. I haven’t reached the point where I speak out loud to what’s on the walls, but . . . the Mitchell always makes me feel energized. When I see it, I wonder, when Joan painted this, was she full of energy, or full of anger?”

MOCA director Strick admires Byrne’s willingness to take risks as a collector. “Although there’s a breadth to the collection, he has a deep interest in European contemporary art, which is distinctive, especially in an L.A. collection. He is someone who has an open mind and open eyes.”

Byrne has never bought something he didn’t like because he was told the price value would surely multiply. “I can’t. I can’t,” he says. “That’s why I have very little photography. People told me to buy Thomas Struth, who’s gone from $8,500 to $85,000 in less than 10 years. But I’m just not passionate about photography.”

Yet it is his passion for so much new art that has shaped Byrne’s collection. Patricia Shea, who manages fine art collections and has appraised Byrne’s, says, “I’m around people who love art all the time, and I find Blake’s intensity and passion inspiring. This has become his life. When he travels to art fairs, he always comes back with an interesting discovery to share. I learn from him.”