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Positioning himself for a pedestal

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Times Staff Writer

“THIS started the whole idea of the gift,” Blake Byrne said, walking over to a whimsical patchwork wall piece at the Museum of Contemporary Art. The work of Cosima von Bonin, a Kenya-born artist who lives in Cologne, it’s made of patterned fabric: brown plaids, beige stripes, off-white windowpanes and orange polka dots. At first glance, the composition looks like an off-kilter abstraction. But then the silhouette of an odd little dog takes shape above a swath of checkerboard quilt, and impressionable viewers are swept away by memories of cuddly pets, old clothes and remnants in grandma’s sewing chest.

“Ann Goldstein made a presentation of things she would like people to contribute to the museum’s collection,” said Byrne, a retired TV executive and MOCA trustee, recalling the curator’s appeal. “I really thought this piece had wonderful humor. I had always wanted to have one of Rosemarie Trockel’s fabrics, but I chased them and they got so expensive that they were just out of the realm. I thought this would be great, so I called Ann a few days later and said, ‘If you don’t have anyone else to buy that, I’ll buy it for the museum as a promised gift.’

For the record:

12:00 a.m. Aug. 10, 2005 For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday August 10, 2005 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 35 words Type of Material: Correction
Winstanley painting -- An article in the Sunday Calendar section about collector Blake Byrne’s gift to the Museum of Contemporary Art described a piece by Paul Winstanley as a photograph. It is an oil-on-linen painting.

“A couple of years later, we did this,” he said, waving his hands around the gallery as he burst into laughter.

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Almost eight months have passed since the museum announced Byrne’s gift of 123 works by 78 artists -- the largest donation of artworks by a private collector in the 26-year-old institution’s history. And excitement has died down since Byrne celebrated his 70th birthday, July 2, with the preview party for the exhibition of highlights from his gift. But he never seems to tire of talking about the art that compels him to collect. Every piece has a story that is likely to grow each time he walks through the show.

Some of the works even talk to him, or themselves, or one another -- or so it seems to Byrne.

“It occurred to me that some of the pieces are saying, ‘Gee, I didn’t expect to be here quite so soon, but I think I’m ready,’ ” he said, with a nod to Tom LaDuke’s painting of a tiny teddy bear sitting on a wall and gazing into space.

In an adjacent gallery, Byrne focused on Rita McBride’s “Servants and Slaves (domestic),” a metal sculpture that resembles an air-conditioning duct, mounted far above eye level.

“This piece curls around the corner and sort of says hello to Marlene Dumas,” he said, swinging around the wall to see Dumas’ figurative drawings while noting that the artists teach at the same school in Amsterdam. “I don’t know how much of this Ann knows and how much just happened by chance. She has done such a great job hanging the show. My collection includes a lot of strange things.”

The son of a Midwestern radio pioneer, Byrne developed his taste for “strange things” fairly recently. His parents owned a few pieces of art and he had had enough interest to enroll in an art appreciation class when he was an undergraduate student at Duke University in Durham, N.C., but he bailed out fast.

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“It was so intimidating,” he said. “In those days, the women must have had SAT scores about 200 points higher than the average man, and they were fantastic at memory. After a week and a half, I realized it was all going to be memory and I went, ‘Oh my Lord, I’m going to die in this class.’ I dropped out because I was petrified.”

He concentrated on business studies and planned to work in finance for Texas Instruments in Nice, France, when he finished his MBA degree at Columbia University in New York. An interview with a CBS recruiter diverted him into an internship in television financing and programming. That led to a career in television that took him to Portland, Ore.; Providence, R.I.; Dallas-Fort Worth; and finally, in 1989, to Los Angeles, where he was president and general manager of KCAL-TV Channel 9 and a partner of Argyle Television.

Determined to “reorganize” his life when he retired in 1997, Byrne bought an apartment in Paris and started Skylark Foundation, a charitable organization that funds art and the humanities, education, environmental protection and services for women, the elderly and gay and lesbian youth. He also became intensely involved with art, building his own collection while devoting considerable time and energy to MOCA and a campaign to build the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke, which will open in October, replacing the university’s former art museum.

Fits and starts, then a passion

BYRNE began collecting bronze sculptures and early American drawings with his former wife. In the mid-1980s, after their 25-year marriage had ended, he began buying Russian icons, but soon realized that he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life trying to authenticate potential acquisitions. He turned to prints, branched out into edgy, contemporary art and then, on the advice of New York dealer Jack Tilton, made a fateful trip to the 1988 Basel art fair in Switzerland. With a budget of $60,000, he bought works by Dumas, Italian sculptor Mario Merz, American artist Richard Tuttle and Spanish artists Christina Iglesias and Juan Munoz, who died in 2001. Two of those early purchases -- Tuttle’s “Sand Tree” assemblage and Munoz’s “Untitled (box)” wood sculpture -- are in the MOCA show.

Off to a serious start, Byrne made the rounds of galleries in the U.S. and Europe, studied exhibition catalogs and began going to auctions. In Los Angeles, he bought works by Mike Kelley from Rosamund Felsen, Mark Lere and John Baldessari from Margo Leavin, Joseph Kosuth from Marc Selwyn. During stays in Paris, he became acquainted with European artists and dealers, expanding his knowledge of the ever-changing contemporary art scene but never claiming to know it all.

Fearless about asking questions, Byrne cheerfully shares his lack of expertise.

“I still have fun thinking about the first time I saw this at Galerie Gabrielle Maubrie in Paris,” he said of a massive chunk of parquet flooring cut from an office in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1977. The work of the late American conceptualist Gordon Matta-Clark, it’s accompanied by a photograph of the building, seen through the hole. “Gabrielle is a just incredibly passionate and intense person about art that she loves. She has a great sense of humor, but when she is talking about the art she loves, her sense of humor leaves her. When I said, ‘Who’s the artist?’ she said, ‘Gordon Matta-Clark.’ I said, ‘Well, who is that?’ and she was just horrified that, as an American, I wouldn’t know who he was. This was in 1989 or ‘90, but a lot of people today don’t know who he is.

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“She gave me a lecture, and it was great. Needless to say, I thought the whole concept was fascinating -- the affinity with conceptual art, the fact that he only made 30 or 35 objects, and the relationship to architecture. I had two roommates in college who became architects; I used to watch them do their design projects and that had an influence on me. I bought this piece, and it has been on my living room floor ever since.”

All the Byrne-collection works on view have been promised to the museum, but many of them will temporarily return to his residences and offices after the show, rather than go into storage.

Another unwieldy artwork with a story is German artist Stephan Balkenhol’s “Vier Figurengruppe” (1999), a group of four carved and painted wood sculptures of men in white shirts and black pants. They stand on blocky red pedestals that increase in height as the figures diminish from larger-than-life to doll size.

“Victor Gisler who runs Mai 36 Galerie in Zurich was always after me to buy a Balkenhol,” Byrne said. “I think the first time I had even seen one was at the L.A. art fair in 1989 or ’90. A collector friend bought one. I didn’t, but from then on, Victor would ask me every year, ‘When are you going to buy a Balkenhol?’ ” Byrne finally found the one he wanted four years ago at Art Unlimited, an exhibition of special projects, including the monumental figure group, at the Basel art fair. “After I saw it, I made a beeline for Victor’s booth and told him I was ready to buy a Balkenhol. He thought it was one of the two smaller ones in his booth. When I said, ‘Not these, the one at Art Unlimited,’ He went, ‘Oh my God. When you do it, you do it.’ ”

“La Vie de Blake,” (French for “The Life of Blake”), an 84-by-84-by-16-inch mixed-media installation by Georges Adeagbo of Benin, came to Byrne in an entirely different way. He got to know Adeagbo’s work in an exhibition in Brussels, organized by Paul Schimmel, chief curator at MOCA, and met the artist in 1996.

“He was dead broke,” Byrne said. “He can live for a year in Benin on $5,000, so I just gave him $5,000 to encourage his work. I figured that was about the best bargain I could get.”

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In return Adeagbo made the installation for his benefactor. It’s composed of five wall-hung, French-text panels and a shelf of paperback art books, wood statuary and clay heads that sits just above the floor. When the first version of the work arrived in Los Angeles, several pieces were broken. Byrne sent them back, at the artist’s request, so that he could bury them and replace them with other objects.

“This was a gift to me,” Byrne said. “When Paul wanted it for MOCA’s collection, I had some hesitancy. But I decided it was much more important for the artist to be in this museum than in my office.”

As the collector strolls through the galleries, he passes video works by artist Steve McQueen and Martin Kersels, a gunpowder drawing by Edward Ruscha, color photographs of grotesque handmade masks by Paul McCarthy, an X-shaped door made to fit into a corner by Robert Gober. Then a large, pale photograph of a landscape vaguely seen through sheer curtains catches his eye.

“That’s Paul Winstanley,” he said, naming the British artist who made the image. “That was in my Paris apartment, and it’s not typical of the things I buy.” But before the obvious question could be asked, he answered it: “I don’t know what is typical.”

One thing he does know is that he has no regrets about his landmark donation to MOCA.

“It made me feel very happy to be 70 and to be able to do this, to have this joy and this fun,” he said. “Outside of having children I don’t know anything in my life I’ve ever done that has made me happier than making this gift. There’s that old saying, ‘Giving makes you feel good; giving is a joy.’ Well I’ll tell you, it’s absolutely true. People have been so incredible. It’s just been a thrill.”

*

‘The Blake Byrne Collection’

Where: Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays; 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays and Fridays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays; closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays

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Ends: Oct. 10

Price: $5 to $8

Contact: (213) 626-6222; www.moca.org

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