Word: scull
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Just across Fifth Avenue from Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum, the U.S.'s amplest conservatory of time-tested art, is a hothouse of the newest and least tested. It is the apartment of Robert C. Scull, the world's most avid collector of Pop art or, as it is more generously called, New Realism...
Plastered Pulse. Among Rorimer's special kicks is encountering in the lobby a life-size plaster cast of one of the Met's curators, Henry Geldzahler, made by Sculptor George Segal. For the Sculls, the plastered Henry (top picture, opposite page) has become a household pet. Scull likes to feel Henry's pulse. "How pale you look," he murmurs. Scull's three boys chat with Henry and use him as a talisman of good luck for exams at school...
Beyond the foyer, the walls are a virtual tapestry of contemporary art; the furniture, mostly antique except for braces of modern Mies and Eames chairs, cowers in the center of the rooms to make place for paintings. Even Scull's eldest son, Jonathan, 15, covers the walls of his room with his own collection of junior-sized examples of Pop that he buys by installments with his allowance. The apartment is so cluttered with art derived from familiar objects that frequently guests pick up an ordinary cigarette box and ask who the artist...
...Walls. New York-born Robert Scull, 45, paid his way through nine years of part-time college by painting signs, ran his own industrial design firm through the 1940s. He and his wife Ethel, whom everybody calls "Spike," lived in a one-room flat a few blocks from the Museum of Modern Art and regarded its paintings as theirs. "Nearly all of our entertaining was held in the penthouse of the museum," Scull reminisces. Then Scull acquired a fleet of taxicabs, some real estate, and started making money...
...spurious Utrillo, bought at auction for $245. "I felt as though I had bought all of A.T. & T.," he recalls. When he became aware that it was a phony, he sold it fast-for $55 profit. He decided after that to gamble with undeniably authentic contemporaries. Nowadays, says Scull, "I spend Sundays prowling studios, the upper stories of fish wholesale buildings, the back alleys of Brooklyn tenements. I don't presume to know a great work of art from a so-so effort. I simply buy what I feel I want to own, and I live with these things...