Rosette in Bloom

Photo by Miguel Flores-Vianna

Delug posing with an untitled 2001-06 Franz West sculpture

Bruce Nauman Takashi Murakami Sterling Ruby Franz West John Baldessari Lawrence Weiner Luc Tuymans Marlene Dumas

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It is hard to imagine anyone recovering from a broken heart with greater élan than Rosette Delug. Her meteoric rise as one of Los Angeles’s most energetic contemporary-art collectors began in the winter of 2001, when she flew from her Beverly Hills home to New York to tell her youngest son, who was attending Columbia University, that she and her husband were getting divorced. Sam Delug, an Australian-born attorney who made a fortune in the international long-distance telephone business, had decamped after 25 years of marriage. His midlife crisis precipitated hers, but thanks to that fateful visit, she bounced back with vigor.

Her friend and attorney Dennis Roach, an avid contemporary-art collector, happened to be in Manhattan that February to attend the Armory Show and invited her to join him. She had never bought art before, but that evening she experienced a coup de foudre and walked away with a drawing by Neo Rauch, a small painting by Luc Tuymans and four drawings of women’s torsos in black lingerie by Marlene Dumas. Not a bad eye for a beginner.

Delug took at once to the challenge of developing her taste — and, perhaps just as important, to that of pushing a deal to completion. She recalls that initially Frank Demaegd, of the Antwerp gallery Zeno X, did not want to sell her the Dumas works. "But I begged, and by the end of the evening, I had the drawings," she says, adding that she carried them home in her suitcase.

The stylish Delug — tall, slender and often clad in Chanel, with an Hermès bag on her arm — was baffled that seasoned gallerists would not immediately sell her what she wanted to buy. "Nobody had ever said no to me before," the 58-year-old admits in her slightly Turkish-accented English. "That was a shock." Eventually, her enthusiasm and commitment convinced dealers to start saying yes.

With those first modest purchases, she was on her way to building a remarkable collection. In just eight years, she acquired some 400 pieces, most of them produced in this decade. Her early bias was for new works by younger artists like Mark Grotjahn, Sterling Ruby and Anna Sew Hoy, along with canvases by such highly prized painters as Cecily Brown, John Currin and Chris Ofili.

By 2003, Delug had become a competitive player who savored the thrill of the chase. That year, along with Roach, she snuck into Art Basel disguised as an installer, in overalls and with a fake badge. "Before [the fair] opened," she says, "I saw every piece of art and was able to buy what I wanted," including paintings and drawings by Matt Greene, Richard Phillips, Chris Vasell and Lisa Yuskavage.

Delug is accustomed to rewriting the rules. In 1972, while she was still in her teens and enrolled in a strict all-girls school in Turkey, her well-to-do Jewish parents chose a husband for her, in accordance with Turkish custom. After exchanging vows with the groom, Delug told her mother and father she would run away rather than stay married.

"It was a big scandal," she says. "A woman wasn’t allowed to get a passport without her husband’s permission." Using an old passport bearing her maiden name, she left Turkey, telling no one but her family.

A divorce was quietly arranged, and she traveled to Los Angeles, where she stayed with family friends while attending UCLA. After graduating, three years later, she returned to Turkey, only to have her parents select another groom for her. She fled back to L.A. and, within a few weeks, met attorney Samuel Delug. They were married in 1977 and had three children together.

Delug’s rebellious past may explain her empathy with daring young artists. It is an inclination she shares with Paul Schimmel, the chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, who is known for organizing such controversial exhibitions as the recent Takashi Murakami retrospective. Roach introduced Delug to Schimmel, who in 2003 — after she had already purchased an enormous Mark Manders sculpture for the museum — asked her to join MOCA’s acquisitions committee. "We started going to galleries," she says. "Can you imagine his insights and the education I got? And Paul knows everybody."