"I probably reject age a bit," Blake Byrne admits with an easy laugh. Here in his Hollywood Hills aerie with its spectacular view of the Los Angeles basin and the Santa Monica Bay, he delights in the provocative work of a new generation of artists jostling for space with contemporary masters in his continually expanding art collection. But Byrne has alighted only briefly between business trips. He now anticipates an imminent departure for Europe, with a stop in Paris -- "my favorite city!" -- for the celebration of his sixtieth birthday. Meantime, he spent the afternoon at a screening of Tim Burton's summer extravaganza, Batman Returns. "It was ferocious and beautiful at the same time," Byrne raves. "A visual delight. I really want to see it again."
And if he now takes time to relax and chat over a rare beer in the kitchen, Byrne still can't seem to allow himself to sit. As he talks, his little dog Watney ( a "Jefferson terrier -- from the pound on Jefferson Street") careens about, seeming to share in the restless energy, while his master casts a proprietary eye through the open doorway to his newest acquisition, Joan Mitchell's 1962 oil painting Blue Nose, a commanding presence over the fireplace in the living room. "It's so beautiful," he says of this choice purchase from the Hirschhorn collection, "and so intense. I love that combination of fragility and strength. And besides," he adds with a chuckle, "since the house was built in 1963, I feel like it belongs here."
A long haul up from the Sunset strip, the house is a contemporary structure whose carefully-balanced interior spaces expand, behind, into the quiet, high-walled containment of the pool area and, to the south and west, into that breathtaking vista. Of the strictly minimalist architecture Byrne notes wryly: "My house represents that, but my art doesn't!" The clean, flat walls lent themselves nicely to Byrne's extensive 1990 remodel, undertaken in part to better accomodate the needs of his collection, and now the high-ceilinged, open-plan living area at ground level is home not only to the Joan Mitchell but to a huge, heavily scumbled abstract painting by Rebecca Purdum, two sculptural works by the Portugese artist Juan Munoz, and Black Newborn #7 (1994), a Brancusi head in black glass by Sherrie Levine which reposes on the grand piano. Placed by the fireplace is Catalan Kowl (1966), an exquisitely structured Anthony Caro piece, and a small Joel Shapiro sculpture stands on the end table by the couch. Lest the edgy presence of the new be forgotten, though, Kim Dingle's prisspapers: baby mashing duck (1994) hangs above the dining table -- a painting which evokes outrageous, unquestionably erotic acts between perfectly nasty little girls in party dresses and various cute nursery animals.
"I love art by young artists," Byrne says, "because they're thinking fresh. And my own interests keep me young. Working in television, I'm always looking out for programs for young people." A behind-the-scenes man, Byrne is the President and Chief Operating Officer of Argyle Television, a company which owns five television stations nationwide, between Honolulu and Providence, Rhode Island. He oversees day-to-day operations, working with the three affiliated networks (ABC, NBC, and FOX,) as well as marketing, and the purchase of syndicated programming from the studios. "It involves," he says mildly, "a lot of travel. That's a big part of my life."
World travel has always involved art for Byrne, who rarely passes up the chance to stop at a museum. "I was always interested," he explains. "My parents always had original art in the house. They were paintings of favorite mountains and desert scenes, art by friends -- but original art." His first collection, surrendered at the time of his 1985 divorce, originated during an extended European honey-moon and trainee exchange program following his graduate work in Finance at Columbia University. It consisted largely of figurative painting and sculpture: "They were my wife's choices," he explains. "I wasn't sophisticated in those days, and I deferred to her." It was only later -- after a lucky break on the stock market -- that he began to look seriously at contemporary art. He soon found a mentor in the New York dealer Jack Tilton who, Byrne says, "was interested in young artists, took time, and was also fun to be with."
Following early, fascinated forays into the New York gallery scene, he took the plunge at the Basel Art Fair in 1986. "It was a big risk for me at that time," he recalls, "but I was really excited." Allowing himself a $50,000 limit, he scouted the booths and assembled a short-list for a starter collection. "I was trying to make the transition from realism," he says of these first coveted objects, which included a small Andy Warhol Open This End label, a Claes Oldenburg sketch of a hanging three-way plug, an Eric Fischl watercolor and, surprisingly perhaps, a Richard Tuttle wall piece. Among them, too, was a work by Munoz who, along with his wife Christina Iglesias, continues to enjoy Byrne's warm support and friendship. For security, he checked his list with his mentor before putting down his money. "It was Jack," he says, "who gave me the confidence that I wasn't crazy."
Since then, Byrne confesses with uncharacteristic understatement to being "a little bit obsessed." He loves to go to the auctions. "There are so many pretentious people," he explains with more relish than malice, "so many natural-born snobs." But he rarely buys there, relying mostly on the galleries he knows and trusts. As a buyer, one associate says, "Blake is very confident. He knows right away what he likes and what he doesn't. And what he goes for has to be smart -- whether funny, or socially critical, or in some other way. It has to have evidence of thought." Says Byrne, of the thrill of finding something that he likes, "It's just great to walk into a gallery and see something and know, this piece is wonderful, or exciting, or refreshing, or curious."
Once having discovered an artist he wants to include in his collection, Byrne settles into a thoughtful and patient mode, content to wait for the right piece to come his way. With a weather eye for exhibition schedules, he makes a point of showing up as early as possible, to assure himself the pick of the crop. Thus with the Los Angeles-based artist Mike Kelley, after what he thought to be "a wonderful exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, I realized I'd like to have a major piece and got to his show [at Rosamund Felson Gallery] as it was opening." The result was his purchase of Silver Ball (1994), a huge, dangling structure of crushed aluminum foil over a wire armature with glimpses, inside, of strange excresences and flashing lights, and sounds generated by four cassette players standing to one side, with baskets of plastic fruit, on a metallic blanket. "You get the feeling of the future and of the beginning of the world," Byrne chuckles. He displays the work in the stairwell that connects the ground floor living area with the bedroom suites below, and loves the fascinated reactions of visitors who know little about art: "'What does it mean, Blake?', they ask me. And I ask them, 'Well, what does it mean to you?'"
Along with Juan Munoz, now represented by nine works in the collection, Mike Kelley is among the artists whom Byrne has begun to collect in depth. Aside from Silver Ball, he has a series of woolly animal wall pieces from 1990 in the entry hall above, and several smaller works of special interest, including two models of pioneer underwater craft from the Civil War, survivors from a 1979 performance piece, The Monitor and the Merrimac. Included in the serried, salon-style display of numerous small works in the stairway and downstairs corridor, they join a trove of works by artists ranging from Warhol, to Richard Prince, to Joesph Beuys, suggesting a fascinated engagement with the diversity of art's world of ideas.
Leading off the corridor, the downstairs spaces -- bedrooms, and a home office used largely as a storeroom -- include artists whom Byrne has supported from early in their careers, before they became known and widely collected. Amongst them are the Bay Area conceptualist, Nayland Blake, known for tough-minded works which combine social comment and gay eroticism; Los Angeles-based Jim Shaw, who works satirically with strip cartoon and other, often gaudy, images from popular culture; Lyle Ashton-Harris, whose photos of black male nudes share Mapplethorpe's appreciation of their beauty, but without the harshness; and Rita McBride, an object-maker whose fabrications combine fetish and fantasy with cool, objective irony.
McBride, a guest at the Paris birthday celebration and creator of a special edition for other guests to honor the occasion, has become a personal friend of Byrne's, and an exception to his rule of thumb that he avoids socializing with the artists he collects. "I've always shied away from that," he says: "You get emotionally inolved with an artist and soon you can't be objective about their work any more." McBride's No Cake Today (1990), a plexi-encased centerpiece on the table in Byrne's master bedroom, is an elaborately frosted wedding-cake surmounted by bronze castings of bicep muscles -- a sly comment on the social conventions of marriage. On the shelf above it lies Fischli & Weis's huge and hilariously erotic phallic bean, Bean: the Beginning of Science (1989), a marked contrast with the classic 1963 Brice Marden painting in black and gray, Dylan Study I, which hangs over the bed, and the suite of Marden prints on the opposing wall.
McBride's Fine Full Apron on the Stoop (1994), a glass slug encased in a concrete step, joins several other works on the patio that surrounds the pool: the massive Variations on a theme by J.K. (1988) by Juan Munoz -- a pale brick wall surmounted by a stylized bronze torso, an homage to Jannis Kounellis; a small, geometric bronze by Tony Smith entitled New Piece (1966); and Liz Larner's wall structure, Iron Twig 1-13 (1991).
With a collection that continues to expand, Byrne is reluctant to consign work to storage. "You buy art because you love it and want to live with it," he insists. "If it loses meaning for you, then sell it." He cautions heavily against buying for investment, although he confesses that he "actually got caught up in the 1988-89 era. I bought some pieces and made a bundle of money. But then," he adds with a rueful laugh, "I sold some things at last May's auctions, and lost money on almost everything. It's not like a stock portfolio. Here the focus is my heart."
Byrne is also generous with gifts to institutions. "Art is meant to be seen," he says. "If I can't keep it on display for any reason, I like to give it away." Because he could not permanently install his Tony Cragg crescent with its multiple plastic components, he donated it to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The Anthony Caro is a promised gift to his alma mater, Duke University, and he has recently given a large Eric Fischl work on paper to the Fort Worth Museum. "I like to give to cities in which we do business," he says. "It's a way of paying back."
With his demanding travel and business commitments, Byrne complains, he gets to spend too little time with his two grown children, Jocelyn (24) and John (29), but he positively glows with pride and pleasure when he speaks of them. A staunch Episcopalian who regrets that his business travel leaves too little time for church service, Byrne is also serious about charitable obligations. He has endowed a scholarship in his father's name at Ohio State University, and supports other projects he feels strongly about. This year, a Thomas Ruff photograph goes to the Gay and Lesbian Art Auction to raise money for G.L.A.D., and Byrne is a regular supporter of Project Angel Food, to benefit home-bound AIDS victims.
But it is living with art, says Bryne, that brings joy and serenity into his life -- and also, importantly for him, humility. "I'm always aware of those wonderfully bright people out there," he muses, "with such great concepts as to how to express themselves. It feels good to wake every morning with all these incredible friends."
