I f there’s one thing Michael Ovitz gets excited about these days, it’s wall space. Fresh, unprogrammed wall space. His home in Los Angeles, a series of glass and perforated-steel boxes descending a green-velvet slope in Benedict Canyon, has been favorably compared with a private museum—a fair assessment, given the range of work on view, from Picassos and de Koonings to African sculpture and the latest discovery he’s pried out of Instagram.
But even with 28,000 climate-controlled square feet at his disposal, Ovitz has been feeling short on space. And now that he and his partner, fashion entrepreneur Tamara Mellon, are spending more time on the East Coast, they’ve bought and renovated a house in Connecticut, and they’re trading up to bigger homes in Manhattan and the Hamptons. All of which means empty walls—and a new impetus to collect.
“When I started in the ’70s, you could actually collect,” Ovitz says, diving into his favorite subject in his Hamptons living room, with his German Shepherd mix, J.J. (for Jasper Johns) close by. “An emerging artist was $5,000. Today an emerging artist is $50,000.” In the ’00s, after he’d been at it for a quarter century, he recalls, “People from the entertainment business would come up to me all the time and say, ‘My God, how did you know to do this so early?’”
Ovitz started looking seriously at art as a student at UCLA in the mid-’60s. After landing a job in the William Morris Agency mailroom—and saving to buy his first work, a Jasper Johns lithograph, for $600—he sped into serious collecting at a rate commensurate with his breakout success as a Hollywood agent. In 1988, at the height of his power as co-founder of the talent agency Creative Artists Agency (CAA), Ovitz purchased Johns’ 1955 “White Flag” painting at auction for roughly $7 million. Nearly four decades later, his insatiable appetite has yielded a collection of some 4,500 works, with the Johns at its heart. Today, Ovitz fits art viewing and research into his packed schedule as a Silicon Valley adviser, venture investor and philanthropist active in medicine and the arts. His 35-year board tenure at the Museum of Modern Art is among the most gratifying roles of his life, he says, up there with grandparenting.
After traveling in similar circles for years, Ovitz and the British-born Mellon got together in 2011. She is a longtime player in the fashion industry, first as co-founder of the Jimmy Choo footwear label and more recently with her own namesake shoe brand. Though she spent part of her childhood in L.A.—her father was a stunt double for Rock Hudson and later the business partner of hair-care mogul Vidal Sassoon—she’s happy to be back East.
“Being English, I’m closer to home here,” Mellon says, sipping kombucha on the couple’s half-moon-shaped sofa. “L.A. is a very different world.” A fully engaged collector in her own right (her first purchases, nearly 30 years ago, were lithographs by Warhol and Basquiat), Mellon is a tireless gallery-goer, seeking out modern and contemporary abstract paintings by female artists alongside sculpture and photography, and she sits on the Chairman’s Council at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“But obviously, being with Michael for the last 15 years has been the greatest education,” she says. “Actually, I have to say sometimes when I look back on what I bought back then, I’m like— ‘Oof.’”
“People from the entertainment business would come up to me all the time and say, ‘My God, how did you know to do this so early?’”
Mellon has found very real connections between her relationship with art and her work in fashion. “It’s constant looking and finding what moves you,” she says. “It might be a vibration between colors, or the stance of a Nigerian figure that filters into a project—but something always sets you off.”
Ovitz, too, says collecting has informed his professional life in myriad ways. When he represented the filmmakers Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese, conversations would frequently veer into the byways of visual world-building and aesthetic theory. During pre-production for Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York,” Ovitz thought the director might benefit from looking at some Rembrandt—“a genius with lighting,” he notes—and he loaned Scorsese a stack of books from his library. “Marty incorporated that into the design,” says Ovitz, who picked up an executive producer credit as a result.
If Ovitz has a philosophy of collecting these days, it’s as contoured as the loose jeans he’s wearing with his navy sweater and spotless white sneakers. “I think the underlying rule is there are no rules,” he says, offering an example from personal experience. “I really don’t understand people who collect only postwar abstract expressionism. If you only collect postwar, you’re missing a big opportunity right now for creativity. We don’t have any guard rails on what we like.” Nor does the couple collect artists in depth: “We don’t want 15 examples of the same artist,” Ovitz says. “We want 15 different artists.”
A quick scroll on Mellon’s laptop reveals the range and quality of work currently residing at the Beverly Hills house. On a wall outside the couple’s bedroom is one of the first pieces they bought together: a Frank Stella “Damascus Gate” painting from the Protractor Series, its 16-foot length displayed between examples of African sculpture. The multi-level art library is hung with paintings by Julie Mehretu, Mark Grotjahn, Roy Lichtenstein and Richard Prince, the shelves topped with dozens of sacred Yoruba ere ibeji carvings of twin figures, the upper air circulating around a 22-foot Alexander Calder mobile. Newer arrivals include paintings by Salman Toor, Lauren Quin, Issy Wood, Asher Liftin and Louise Giovanelli, a young London painter who accepted the couple’s commission for an 18-foot-long work after making a site visit to the L.A. house (no pressure).
Lisa Dennison, Ovitz’s longtime liaison at Sotheby’s and its chairman, Americas, has studied his collecting mindset over the years. “In three words: Buy the best. That’s easy to say, right?” she suggests. “A lot of people would say that’s their mantra, too. But with Michael, he knows what the best is and he has the access to it.”
Since his earliest acquisitions of Ming-period Chinese furniture in the 1980s, Ovitz has also approached design with a collector’s eye. Lately the couple has been gravitating to modern and contemporary pieces—chairs by Shiro Kuramata and Joris Laarman, for instance, tables by Diego Giacometti and Maarten Baas. In the L.A. dining room, two round tables are encircled by elegant Biedermeier-style chairs, everything a curiously textured black that bristles in the sunlight. “They’re cherrywood,” Ovitz says of the tables. “They were designed for me by Michael Graves to complement the Chinese furniture, because Chinese furniture that’s 400 years old looks like cherry.” But tastes change, and one day Ovitz decided to send the whole lot off to the Netherlands, where the conceptually minded Baas “burned everything,” he says.
Mellon breaks out laughing. “So you either get this,” she says, nodding at the exquisite room, “or you get a box of ashes.”
With three new residences to furnish, the couple has an opportunity to diversify into drawings and other “small jewels,” as Dennison puts it. They’ve begun studying Greek and Roman antiquities, Old Master drawings, impressionist paintings and rare books. “What’s fun is both of us being educated at the same time—so we’re doing it together,” Mellon explains.
“I’ll find Michael and Tamara in remote corners of our impressionist and modern day sale preview, looking at things I’d never seen him looking at before,” Dennison says. “And he’s always kind of apologetic about it. But I mean, why not?”
One reason might be bandwidth. Cross-category collecting is time-consuming, especially when the collector is a stickler for research and provenance. Ovitz has no full-time curator, relying instead on books and a network of trusted advisors. “It’s challenging—it’s overwhelming, frankly,” he admits. “But I love learning, and so does Tamara. Which is also why I deal with all these young AI founders, at the end of the day.”
In a milieu where access to information is everything, Ovitz’s indefatigability is a superpower, Dennison suggests. “I think what he brings to collecting is the same thing he brings to all of his businesses. It’s this relentless drive, this desire to succeed.” She calls his use of an advisory network “admirable—he is willing to listen. And get opinions, even if they’re contrary to what he wants to hear.”
At this point, Ovitz says, the voice he trusts most implicitly is Mellon’s. “We don’t buy anything that we don’t both love,” he says. “We collect a lot of African art, and I think she’s less interested in that, but I still run it by her. I collect watches, and she doesn’t care. But she does like to look at them.”
“We buy now when we both have a visceral reaction,” Mellon adds, mentioning the work of Francesco Cima, a young painter Mellon’s daughter, Minty, has just turned them onto.
“I have great respect for Tamara’s intellect and her creative knowledge,” Ovitz says. “She’s got a very good eye. It helps me, because I get too excited too quickly. I love art, and if I could, I’d buy everything I’ve ever seen.”
He admits to being much more considered than he once was about deaccessioning. “I had a problem early on. I did a lot of that because I really didn’t have my own take sometimes.” Much more gratifying, he adds, is being able to donate work to a public institution where more people can enjoy it. A few years ago, he gave “Presentation,” a 2005 Dana Schutz painting, to MoMA, and many other gifts have been made or promised. At any one time, some 40 to 70 works from the collection are on loan to museums.
“We’ve both worked hard, but we’ve been lucky,” Ovitz says. “We get to live with museum-quality, cultural icons. They stimulate us. It’s educational. We can share that. Neither of us were born into this world—we talk about how lucky we are.”
If there is one piece Ovitz will never part with, it’s the first one he ever bought—the Jasper Johns lithograph. “It’s there as a signal of where I started,” he says. Growing up in Encino, in the San Fernando Valley, the closest thing to art in his life was the Universal Studios backlot a few blocks away. “I grew up in a $2,800 house,” Ovitz says. “I don’t think my dad made $300 bucks a week. I know where I came from, and I like to have reminders. I mean, I still walk around at night and turn the lights off.”
Does he approach art in a different way than he might have four decades ago? “I’ve never thought about that,” Ovitz replies. “But I think I see differently today. And Tamara pushes me a lot, because when you’re with someone whose opinion you respect, and they see something you don’t see, it starts to be very one-plus-one-makes-five.
“The more we collect, the more we see. But look, I love art. I love artists. And the dialogue is never ending.”
Hair, Akki Shirakawa; makeup, Fulvia Farolfi; production, VLM Productions.
