So Bob Scull got an idea. Why not get to the artists before their work reaches the gallery even? Why not do even better than thatâwhy not
discover
them?
One evening a friend of Bob's, a psychiatrist, said to him: “Bob, did it ever occur to you that when you commission young artists to create works of art, you may be influencing the course of art history?”
Patron.
Shaper of history
. If the truth be known, it had already crossed Bob's mind that he had influenced art history by buying twenty works by Johns in 1959 and 1960. Before that, Johns was just
some kind of odd man out in the art world, some guy from South Carolina trying to bug the establishment with his fey, representational rendition of banal objects. The fact that he was actually being
collected
âwell, that's what started Pop Art. Yes, that thought had crossed Bob's mind. But why not go even one step furtherâ
discover
the greats of tomorrow yourself and
commission
the future of art history. Stalk their very studios. That was how Bob ran into Walter De Maria.
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It was a Saturday. Another Culture Sabbath. Bob Scull was walking down Madison Avenue, and you know, it's funny on Saturday in New York, especially on one of those Indian summer daysâGod, somehow Culture just seems to be in the air, like part of the weather, all of the antique shops on Madison Avenue, with a little blaze of golden ormolu here and a little oxblood-red leathery marquetry there, and the rugs hung up in the second-floor display windowsârich!âa Bakhtiari with a little pale yellow setting off the redâand the galleries, God, gallery after gallery, with the pristine white walls of Culture, the black wooden floors, and the Culture buds, a little Renoirish softness in the autumn faces.
Through the window of this particular gallery, Scull can see two girls who are tending the place, and one is sitting with her legs crossed, a short skirt on, great pre-Raphaelite hair, the perfect Culture bud, and it is not that he wants to make a pass or anything, it is just part of this beautiful atmosphere of Culture in New York, Indian summer, Culture Sabbath, all the restâso he goes in. It is just a pleasure to go on in there and let the whole thing just sort of seep through you like hot coffee.
But what a freaking show. Here is some wooden sculpture of some sort, two very tall pillars of woodâand then there is a bunch of drawings. Except that there doesn't seem to be anything on the paper, just a lot of framed blank paper on the wall. What the hell is this? Scull goes up very close to a drawing and then he can see there is a hard little design on the paper done with a hard pencil, a No. 8 or something, so you can hardly see it. Then down at the bottom, also in this hard pencil, are these poverty-stricken little words: “Water, water, water.”
So Scull turns to the girl and he says, “I've seen a lot of things, but how does this guy think he's going to sell these?”
“Well ⦔
“I mean, I don't know what this whole art thing is coming to. You can't even
see
what's on the paper.”
He looks back at it again and it still says “Water, water, water.” That's all that's up there. Well, the girl says, it's by a young artist,
they never handled him before. She shrugs. Scull is really bugged by this whole thing.
“All right,” he says, finally, “how much is this drawing?”
She gives him a lookâwhat the hell, this girl never even thought about the price before. Nobody ever asked. Finally she says, “It's $110.”
“All right,” says Scull, “I tell you what. This whole thing bugs me. I'll buy this drawing for $110 if you'll give me the artist's name, address and telephone number. I want to see what he has to say about this.”
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So she says all right, and it's Walter De Maria. So the following week Scull calls up the number. The thing is, the whole thing
disturbs
him, and so this guy may have something he ought to know about. The telephone conversation disturbs him some more. This Walter De Maria comes to the phone and Scull says, “This is Robert Scull.”
“Yes.” That's all he says.
“Do you know who I am?”
There's this long pause. Then this hesitant voice: “Yes. You're the man who bought my drawing.”
“That's right,” Scull says. “I'd like to come to your studio and see some more of your work.”
There's a big silence. Scull starts saying, Hello, hello. He thinks the guy must have hung up.
“I don't know,” the guy says. “I won't be available.”
“Look,” says Scull, “I bought your drawing and I want to see some more of your work. Can't I even come and look at it?”
“I don't know. I'm glad you bought the drawing, but you bought the drawing from the gallery, not from me, and I'm not available.”
Scull is really rocked by this, but he keeps arguing and finally De Maria gives in and says O.K., come on down to his studio. The studio is downtown up in a loft building, about five flights up, and Scull climbs up there. His heart is banging away from the freaking stairs. There's a small room and then a bigger room beyond, and in the small room here are these two pale, slender figures, Walter De Maria and his wife. Mrs. De Maria is kind of backed off into a corner. She doesn't say anything.
“Well,” says Scull to De Maria, “I'd like to see some more of your drawings.”
So he shows him one and this time Scull has to put on his
glasses
to see if there's anything on paper. He looks up, and by this time De Maria is pacing around the room and running his hands through his hair in a terrible state of agitation.
What the hell is this? Scull says to himself. You could get a heart attack walking up these freaking stairs, and after you get up here, what's going on? He's sorry he even came up. But as a last gesture, he asks De Maria to show him what he had been doing before he did the drawings. Here, says De Maria, that's what I've done. What's that? says Scull. That's a sculpture, says De Maria. Here is this Skee-Ball, like in the amusement arcades, on a wooden board, and it says on there, “Place ball in upper hole,” and so Scull dutifully places it in the upper hole and pow! it falls down into a hole at the bottom. Scull stares at the ball. And De Maria, like, he's watching Scull this whole time, waiting for a reaction, but Scull can't come up with any, except that he's still bugged.
“How long have you been a sculptor?” he says.
“Six years.”
“Well, can I see some of your earlier work?”
“It's in the other room.”
The other room is bigger, a studio room, with all white walls and a white floorâand nothing else. It's empty. Yeah, well, where is it? Scull says. Over here, says De Maria. Over here? De Maria is pointing to a little filing cabinet. He's done a lot of successful sculptures, he says. The only thing is, he never made them. He never made them? No. He couldn't afford the materials. Well, yeah, says Scull, then he says, What's in the file? De Maria riffles through and here are more of these sheets of paper with something on there you can't even see, a few lines and more “Water, water, water” and so forth.
The whole thing now has Scull so bugged he says, “Lookâif I commission you to do one for me and I get you the materials, will you make one?”
De Maria says O.K. A couple of months go by and finally De Maria says he has completed a design and he'll need a large plate of silver. Silver? says Scull. Why can't he use stainless steel. It's got to be silver, says De Maria. So Scull gets him the silver. Through all this Bob and Spike get to know De Maria a little better, but it's an unusual relationship. Sometimes one of them says something and there is no response, nothing at all. Other times, they're all out on the street and De Maria walks way ahead, as if he didn't know them. Who are these people following him? Bob says to himself: Ah, he's been through a lot of excitement because of all this. That's all it is.
Then three and a half or four more months go by, andânothing. Bob is on the verge of going back there and getting his silver back. But then one day De Maria calls up and says the sculpture is ready. He brings it up in a truck, and they bring it up into the apartment; it's the big moment and everything, and here is this big object with
a velvet drapery over it. Bob pulls a string and opens up the drapesâand there it is, the piece of silver, the original plate of silver, with nothing on it. Bob stares at the piece of silver. De Maria is watching him just like he did the first day with the Skee-Ball.
“What is it?” says Scull.
“Look on the back.”
On the back is a little piece of chrome inscribed “Nov. 5, 1965, made for Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Scull.” There are also instructions to photograph the plate of silver every three months and keep the pictures in a photograph album. The sculpture is entitled The Portrait
of Dorian Gray
. The thing is, says De Maria, the silver will tarnish, and the plate will get blacker and more and more corroded and the film will record the whole process. Every three months until 1975, presumably, Bob or Spike will pull the velvet drapes and take a picture of this piece of corroded metal and then paste it in the scrapbook.
The Portrait of Dorian Gray!
But of course!
“I was overwhelmed by it,” Scull told me later. “It's impossible to describe what happens to a collector when he commissions something and it turns out right.
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Bob and Spike went out to New Jersey to the studio of George Segal. Segal is famous for his plaster-cast sculptures. Bob and Spike commissioned him to make one of them. So Segal started encasing them in the plaster. It was kind of a wild time. Sometimes the plaster starts sticking to the skin when it dries. Spike lost one of her Courrèges boots in the struggle to get out, and Bobâthey had to pull his Levi's off him to keep him from being a permanent living cast. The shape of history, all right. Bob and Spike decided to unveil the sculpture at a party for a couple of hundred celebrities, artists, columnists, and editors. They didn't even know half of themâbut they would come, they would come.
The afternoon before the party, Jasper Johns's latest show opened at the Leo Castelli gallery, 4 East 77
th
Street. There were four huge paintings in the show and Bob wasn't going to get any of them. For a variety of reasons. For one thing, three of them had been spoken for, by museums. Nevertheless, Bob was in a good mood. Spike didn't even show up, but Bob was in a good mood. Castelli's, especially at an opening like this, was where it was at. You could tell that at a glance. Not by the paintings, but by the Culture buds. They were all there, all these gorgeous little Culture buds, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 years old, along in there, their little
montes Veneris
in the sweet honey grip of Jax slax that finger into every fissure, their serious little Culture pouts hooded in Sassoon thrusts and black Egypt eyesâtheir lubricous
presence, like that of the whalebird, indicating where the biggest fish in the sea is.
Out in the middle of the bud coveys Bob is talking to Leo Castelli. Castelli, New York's number-one dealer in avant-garde art, is a small, trim man in his late fifties. Bob is Leo's number-one customer. Leo is the eternal Continental diplomat, with a Louis-salon accent that is no longer Italian; rather, Continental. Every word he utters slips through a small velvet Mediterranean smile. His voice is soft, suave, and slightly humid, like a cross between Peter Lorre and the first secretary of a French embassy.
“Leo,” says Bob, “you remember what you told me at Jap's last show?”
“Nooooooooâââ”
“You told meâI was
vulgar!
Ӊonly Bob says it with his eyes turned up bright, as if Leo should agree and they can have a marvelous laugh over it.
“Noooooo, Bob”
“Listen, Leo! I got newsâââ”
“Nooooooo, Bob, I didn'tâââ”
“I got news for you, Leo
“Nooooooooooo, Bob, I merely saidâââ” Nobody says No like Leo Castelli. He utters it as if no word in the entire language could be more pleasing to the listener. His lips purse into a small lubricated O, and the Nooooooo comes out like a strand of tiny, perfect satinywhite pearls â¦
“Leo, I got news for youâââ”
“Nooooooooo, Bob, I merely said that at that stage of Johns's career, it would be wrongâ”
“Vulgar
you said, Leoâ”
“âwould be wrong for one collector to buy up the whole showâ”
“You said it was
vulgar
, Leo, and you know what?”
“What, Bob?”
“I got news for you
âyou were right!
It
was
vulgar!” Bob's eyes now shine like two megawatt beacons of truth; triumphant, for the truth now shines in the land. For one of the few times in his life, Castelli stares back blank; in velvet stupefaction.
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