At Home with Henry

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.

The Sculls, in most respects a normal, unpretentious, upper middle-class American family, live with Pop, sleep with it, eat with it, relax with it, and love it. They are not, however, bitter cultural rebels, ready to dynamite the Corinthian columns of the Met. At least Met Director James Rorimer does not think so. He enjoys going to the Sculls' for dinner and finding out how avant a garde can get.

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 was.

A.T. & T. on the 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.

His first art acquisition was a 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. I just love them."

The Sculls have commissioned 15 new paintings during the past ten years, including several family portraits. Andy Warhol, when asked to do a portrait of Ethel, put her in an automatic snapshot studio in Times Square and fed heaps of quarters into it. "Now start smiling and talking," said the artist, while the mechanical camera took scores of candids, "this is costing me money." Then Warhol silk-screened 35 of the most vivid views onto squares of canvas, colored variously to give them the psychologically potent hues, producing a serial portrait of a woman in love with life.

Plaster-packer Segal, whose works recall Pompeian people petrified in lava, did a cast of Scull, and James Rosenquist did a family portrait. In it, nothing shows of Scull but his legs and feet, next to a realistic taxicab with open door, and inside the cab, an upside-down closeup of Ethel being kissed on the nose by one of her children. "Not quite the Mona Lisa," says Scull, "but it's us."

One Luminous Thing. Scull is somewhat shocked by his notoriety as a Pop art collector. Of the 200-odd works he has bought, mostly by abstract expressionists, only about 40 are by Pop artists. His living room is an oasis of his earlier purchases, safe and strangely solacing works by Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. But he ardently defends Pop.

"It's not a statement of what the world could be, or will be, or was, or should have been," he says. "It is a statement of what is, an art that will show who and what we really are and what we really thought long after we are all gone, because it holds up in one object or one surface, in one bright, luminous and concentrated thing--whether a beer can or a flag--all the dispersed elements that go to make up our lives."

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