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The art of collecting

Warhol. Miro. Picasso. Carlo Bilotti's art trove could fill a museum and soon it will. The Palm Beach resident's magnificent villa would otherwise burst at the seams.

By LENNIE BENNETT
Published March 6, 2005

[AP photos]

Collector Carlo Bilotti stands before an Andy Warhol, one of many artworks at his Palm Beach home. Bilotti, who is a Salvador Dali Museum trustee, helped the museum acquire its new painting, Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea Which At Twenty Meters Becomes a Portrait of Abraham Lincoln.

	A pair of Picassos, Tete de Femme, above, and Le Peintre et son Modele, below, hangs in Bilotti’s living room.
	A sculpture, done in the style of the late American realist sculptor Duane Hanson, is placed at the French doors of his guest house to evoke either whimsy or perhaps a startled response.
	Carlo Bilotti stands in front of a panel by Joan Miro in the foyer of his Palm Beach home.

PALM BEACH - Midnight slinks across the broad marble floors on a trapezoidal course toward the painting. The black cat sidles up to the framed canvas resting against a corner wall of the living room in an Italianate mansion just off Ocean Drive, a few blocks south of Worth Avenue.

"Midnight," says Carlo Bilotti, the master of the cat, the mansion and the painting, "I'm not sure I want you rubbing against the Chagall."

Midnight looks up at the elaborate trompe l'oeil ceiling and meows.

Bilotti sighs, then smiles.

Even Chagall must accommodate family life.

Bilotti's lifelong avocation as an art collector is anything but casual, and he doesn't treat his art casually either. But he does live with it, and, just as important, so does his family: Tina, his wife of 37 years, their two children, Eric, 14, and Megan, 11, their Shih Tzu, Leo, and, of course, Midnight.

Bilotti is and has been many things in his life but what has most defined, interested and sustained him for the majority of his 70 years is collecting. In the contemporary art arena that is often more about acquiring ersatz trophies and investments with the help of expensive advisers, Bilotti is the real thing, a collector who does his own research and buys what he loves.

"There are several kinds of collectors," he says. "For some it is the terrible need to possess, to own, to buy art to show off. Then there are people like me, who buy with no curatorial plan. I buy what I like. It gives me a feeling that is difficult to explain. My collection is quite original because it has such variety."

And the pragmatist in him is always open to change.

"At some point you have to sell," Bilotti says. "Nobody has an unlimited amount of money and sometimes you have too many of one artist. I have a lot of Chagalls, for example."

Bilotti bought his first important work, a painting by Giorgio de Chirico, when he was 20; by 32 he had assembled an impressive collection of contemporary Italian art.

Today his collection is a Rolodex of the most important names in 20th century art.

Bilotti, who owns several paintings by the Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali and knew him for many years, is a trustee of the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg. He makes occasional visits to the Tampa Bay area for board meetings and fundraisers and has lent from his collection to the museum. He was at the museum gala Saturday for the unveiling of a new purchase, Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea Which At Twenty Meters Becomes a Portrait of Abraham Lincoln, which Bilotti played a key role in finding and acquiring. (See related story, Page XE.)

He considers Florida, especially Palm Beach, the family's home base.

"It's where our children have gone to school," he says. "And it is so beautiful here."

But Bilotti is a part of the international art scene. He maintains an office in New York where he oversees his investments and has pied-a-terre there, in Rome and southern Italy. He keeps what he calls a small yacht off the Italian coast.

"It's only 80 feet or so," he says. "Most of the people I know have much bigger ones."

What art doesn't fit among the Bilottis' domiciles is stored in a warehouse.

Next week, he and his family go to his hometown of Cosenza, Italy, where his brothers still live, for the opening of an exhibition in the city's new museum there, the Museo di Sant' Agostino, a reclaimed 14th century convent. Part of his large collection will be on view, along with several bronze sculptures by 20th century French artist Emilio Greco, which he has given to the museum.

He's in the middle of plans for his own museum, the Museo Carlo Bilotti, in Rome's Villa Borghese complex, funded by the Italian government, that will house some of his trove of de Chirico paintings.

And he has commissioned contemporary artist Damien Hirst to create four large panels for a small decommissioned chapel, also in Rome, that will be "not a religious place but a place of meditation," much like the Rothko Chapel in Houston.

His reason for concentrating most of his philanthropy is Italy is straightforward.

"Here I would get a wall or a room," he says. "In Italy, I get a museum with my name on it."

The chapel, which was originally to be on the grounds of the Palm Beach house but was nixed by Hirst as "too fancy," arises from a deeper impetus.

"I have had health problems," he says. "I am not what you would call a religious person. Lately, I have been practicing."

On a recent Thursday, he apologizes for the empty spaces in some rooms in Palm Beach; he has just shipped off a trove of works by Picasso, Leger, Chagall, Miro, Kandinsky and others to Cosenza for the Saturday opening, which will be attended by officials including the governor of Rome. Still, large paintings by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein cover one wall; two Picassos are nearby. The dining room is dominated by a rare Cy Twombly that actually looks a little representational. A Calder mobile twirls in the two-story foyer. The painting by Marc Chagall that lured Midnight is waiting to fill one of the voids.

A benefit luncheon is winding down at Mar-a-Lago when Carlo Bilotti arrives. Women in boucle Chanel jackets stream past him, collecting their La Mer gift bags, as he enters the fabled old building, greeted by car valets and staff. He's a board member and a director of the club, on a first-name basis with its owner, Donald Trump, and his new wife, Melania. People stop by Bilotti's table in the shaded part of the terrace, including the wife of the city's mayor. He ignores his cell phone except for one call, from a representative at Christie's Auction House in New York. She has news about some art he is interested in buying or selling. And she probably wants to discuss all those Chagalls. He tells her he'll call back.

"I love to acquire," he says. "I'm not crazy about selling."

Bilotti was born into a distinguished southern Italian family; his mother was a former baroness and his father owned a successful lumber business and paper mill. Bilotti attended law school at the universities of Naples and Palermo before coming to the United States in 1961 "for fun. I had some friends here even though my English was terrible."

He wound up staying, improving his English and editing a small Italian-American magazine in New York, buying investment properties with the help of his father. And, of course, he bought art. His first collection, of Italian futurists, drew some attention in the New York art world because the artists - Balla, Boccioni and Severini, for example - were rarely seen here. And his growing group of de Chiricos was a big attraction. In 1967 he was invited to exhibit his collection, by then numbering about 85, at Penn State University Museum and Finch College Museum in Manhattan. One of the students on the Finch exhibition committee was Margaret Embury Schultz, whose grandfather, William Lightfoot Schultz, founded the Shulton Co., which created and sold toiletries, including Old Spice for men, now owned by Procter & Gamble. They fell in love and were married in 1967.

In 1970, Bilotti signed on to manage Jacqueline Cochran, a European cosmetics company with high-end lines such as Nina Ricci, Pierre Cardin, Geoffrey Beene and La Prairie.

And he continued to collect art.

"I began to diversify," he says, and New York was a great place in the 1960s for those interested in art.

Along with modern masters, he bought contemporary art.

"Pop art," he says. "I really liked it, the simple message, the idea of advertising and its direct communication."

The appeal was not only aesthetic.

"I liked getting to know the artists," he says. "Many of them became my friends and still are."

He got to know Salvador Dali and Andy Warhol, when the artist's magazine, Interview, was foundering in the 1970s.

He bought advertising in the publication and commissioned Warhol to create a series of flower paintings promoting his company's fragrances.

He also commissioned work by Dali for his perfumes, "scenes of Paris," he says, "because I had French fragrances. I was always interested in mixing art and business."

Bilotti sold the Cochran company in 1987. By then he was a wealthy man who could afford just about anything.

Two years later, the Bilottis' only child, Lisa, born in 1969, died of cancer at 20. Photographs of her are scattered around their Palm Beach home. Before Lisa's death, Andy Warhol had painted her with her mother, one of the artist's few double portraits.

In 1990, the couple moved from New York to Palm Beach and adopted two children. Their photographs, too, share space on bookshelves, mementos of a new life wrested from grief.

The Palm Beach house, built in 1923 and designed by Mar-a-Lago's architect, Marion Sims Wyeth, was such a mess when they bought it, they intended to tear it down.

"An architect convinced us to renovate instead," Bilotti says. "We had no idea how much work it would be. The entire foundation had to be replaced. Almost everything had to be replaced."

But it still looks like an old, albeit restored, house. Pecky cypress beams were installed in one room, and the muralist who once worked with legendary decorator Renzo Mongiardino came from Italy to create faux finishes on walls and ceilings such as the intricate stenciling in the foyer, distressed to look original. The house is decorated with beautifully upholstered chairs and sofas and heavy cotton curtains swagged with the kind of tasseled passementerie priced at $100 a yard or more. But it isn't ostentatious and none of it is "themed" to the precious paintings and sculptures in every room, probably because Bilotti moves everything around so much.

"My wife shakes her head every time I loan a painting because it means we probably have to repaint a wall," he says.

Most of the time, Tina does not involve herself directly in his decisions.

But once, he says, many years ago, he brought home a painting by Francis Bacon, one of his typically disturbing portraits.

"I was very excited about it. I leaned it against the wall so she would see it and went out for something," he says. "When I came back, she had turned it to face the wall. I asked her why and she said it scared our daughter. I sold it.

"I never owned conceptual or minimal art because I don't like it," Bilotti says. Nor is he inclined toward confrontational art, which makes his choice of Hirst for the chapel commission interesting. Hirst is one of the most famous and unconventional artists in the world, who has put a shark carcass and cross-sectioned animals in formaldehyde.

"I can't say I like the shark," he says. "But I'm fascinated by what he does."

The Hirst panels are titled Four Evangelists, referential collages with found objects including pages from the Bible.

"We talked about the frames, which he wanted to make with bones, real bones that you can buy legally from India, but Tina said no. So he will carve or cast them. Think about it: It is about humanity and the history of man."

One of the sculptures in the sunny lanai overlooking the swimming pool and 2-acre garden is a bronze by Hirst, a riff on Degas' little ballerina. From one side, she looks like a sweet young girl. On the other side, Hirst has peeled back her clothing and skin to reveal her skull and belly in which a fetus grows.

Hirst spent the day with the Bilottis recently to discuss the Rome chapel. Bilotti says he alarmed their son with his eccentric behavior and Eric retreated to his bedroom. Their daughter was charmed by him. Afterward, an unsolicited work arrived from the artist, a brilliant blue canvas embedded with real butterflies, favorite emblems of Hirst. It leans against a wall, waiting to be hung in Megan's bedroom. Bilotti turns it over. On the back of the work is scrawled, "For Megan with a Big Kiss from Damien Hirst."

Bilotti doesn't name-drop but when pressed, he reels off the bigger stars in his inventory that aren't hanging around the Palm Beach house: Henri Matisse, Willem de Kooning, Wifredo Lam, Max Ernst, Jean Dubuffet, Francesco Clemente, Robert Rauschenberg, Sam Francis, Lucio Fontana, Larry Rivers . . . he pauses.

"Larry Rivers was a good friend," he says of the artist who died in 2002. "Would you like to see a painting he made for me?"

Rivers' glowing, three-dimensional homage to Matisse's The Dancers hangs in an upstairs sitting room. Created especially for Bilotti, it is the first of several in a series he would do about Matisse. More art lines the walls.

Beyond, in the master bedroom, hang only two works. They are small framed drawings, portraits of Tina and Carlo Bilotti in crayon. He gestures toward them, as he would his Picassos.

They are signed by the artist, Megan Bilotti.

- Lennie Bennett can be reached at 727 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com

[Last modified March 3, 2005, 11:07:42]