When Elizabeth Brooke Blake moved into her Dallas apartment 18 years ago, the first stamp she chose to put on the dwelling symbolized her devotion to Modern and Contemporary art. Before the walls took on a pale gray and the floors a stark shade of white, Blake had the ceiling of the gallery-like space raised to accommodate the monumental pieces in her collection, such as William T. Wiley’s 8-foot-tall two-part painting "Near the Quarry" (1976).

But pushing boundaries—whether within a home or in the art world—seems to have always been a part of life for the 91-year-old collector, even though she doesn’t see herself as a risk-taker. Blake, who goes by the less formal moniker "Betty," has been at the crest of wave after wave of Contemporary art since the 1940s as a patron and an advocate, having acquired paintings and sculptures by preeminent 20th-century artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Alexander Calder, Jasper Johns, Lee Krasner, Alberto Giacometti, Josef Albers, Claes Oldenburg, Mark di Suvero, and Joan Miró. "I have very definite ideas about what I like and what I don’t like," she says. "I buy only what I love."

Adhering steadfastly to this credo, she has combined important postwar art with 20th-century design elements and antiques to create a bold, eclectic, and very personal living space. For a woman who says she remembers Dallas when "it was like a little village" and whose mother survived the sinking of the Titanic, Blake has furnished her apartment in a style that is surprisingly youthful. As Blake’s longtime friend, Dallas-area decorator Joseph Minton, puts it, "Betty’s tastes run avant-garde, young, fearless, and sure."

Digging a little deeper into Blake’s collecting impulses reveals that she acquired many of her pieces, including works by Johns and Jim Dine, within a year of their creation, when the artists were relatively young and during that precarious period before they entered the accepted canon. "Betty was in the forefront of supporting and collecting these artists and their work," says Karl Willers, former executive director of the Newport Art Museum in Rhode Island, where selections from Blake’s collection were exhibited last summer. "She has some very choice examples of work by seminal artists."

Blake, who was born to a wealthy family in Philadelphia, says she started honing her eye when she was sent to Paris as a teenager for schooling in the arts. There, she made weekly pilgrimages to the Louvre and other museums, and though she admired works by great 16th- and 17th-century painters, she became impatient with her lack of exposure to Contemporary artists. "We weren’t taught anything about what was going on in the day," she recalls. Intrigued, she sought opportunities to look at new art in New York, London, and elsewhere. She began collecting in 1943 when she moved to Dallas with her third husband, John Roll McLean II—son of Evalyn Walsh McLean, onetime owner of the Hope Diamond—and started visiting Mexico City. There she frequented the Inés Amor Gallery and bought works by Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, and other Mexican Modernists. "Mexico City was the only place you could go during the war," she says. "It was fantastic. People from all over the world were there."
;
Her appetite for cutting-edge art continued to grow. In 1950, she opened the Betty McLean Gallery, Texas’s first retail showcase for Contemporary art, and stocked it with works by artists including Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt, and Henri Matisse. Modern art, particularly of the abstract variety, was a tough sell in Dallas back then. "People wanted Texas bluebonnets and landscapes," says Blake, who admits she and gallery director Donald Vogel didn’t sell much, even though they priced a large Monet at only $6,000. Her customers weren’t the only ones who missed a chance to make a great investment. "There were some magnificent Picassos, one for only a few thousand dollars," Blake recalls. "I should have bought them, and then I could have relaxed for life!"