A Collector's Chutzpah.(Ethel Scull)

Byline: Barbara Heizer

Barbara Heizer remembers Ethel Scull, sixties art doyenne, fashion star, and Warhol icon.

At the black-tie opening of a Jasper Johns show at the National Gallery of Art in Washington last year, something caught my eye. I stopped at the concentric rings of Target with Four Faces and looked at the wall text. COLLECTION OF THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK . . . , it read. GIFT OF MR. AND MRS. ROBERT C. SCULL. The name Scull jolted me back to another time: As a young girl living in New York, I had read it boldfaced in newspapers and magazines in connection with parties, fashion, and, most of all, art. Robert Scull was a taxicab-company magnate and a king among art collectors; his wife, Ethel, was a sharp-voiced, go-go art queen, lithe and attractive in a Balenciaga gown. Their presence in their 1960s heyday, so bold and ebullient, had long since evaporated, along with their marriage and their collection, nearly all donated or sold years ago.

The Sculls originally owned as many as 30 Johnses, as well as remarkable works by De Kooning, Newman, Rothko, Rauschenberg, Warhol, Rosenquist, Stella, and others--the kinds of images I would rip out of magazines as an art-crazy teenager and pin up on my bedroom walls. Up the marble stairs, I landed at Out the Window, the painting that the Sculls' representatives flipped a coin over after their 1985 divorce settlement, with Ethel winning the toss and later selling the painting, now in the collection of David Geffen. In an age before almost every high-earning New Yorker was a contemporary-art collector, these pieces were unveiled to the American public in the July 1964 issue of VOGUE. Pages of photographs devoted to the Sculls' collection ran alongside a portrait of the couple, Bob and "Spike," she in an elegant Chanel suit, in a mid-century-modern and antiques-furnished interior, its big walls covered with big art.

In their Fifth Avenue apartment and weekend house in East Hampton, the Sculls were avid entertainers. "The hostess with the mostest" is how De Kooning inscribed his Untitled (Woman) drawing to Ethel. And Robert, a former industrial designer, elicited awe and envy for his acquisitions, his eye educated by the dealers Leo Castelli, Sidney Janis, and Richard Bellamy. Robert listened, looked, and bought--at a deal. Ethel was always photographed at parties posed next to painters or their paintings, making it all seem so glamorous and accessible.

The cameras followed Ethel wherever she went. She had a knack for mixing fashion with a big dose of art to create a photo op or story--a common occurrence now but new and adventurous then. There she was in an organdy two-piece Adolfo in front of Rosenquist's big F-111; in a silver gossamer transparent Saint Laurent dress on her way to a 1966 Venice Biennale party; cast in plaster for a life-size George Segal sculpture, wearing a Courreges dress (fake) and boots (real), at the insistence of her friend Alexander Liberman, the artist and Conde Nast's Editorial Director. CHUTZPAH was the Women's Wear Daily headline in a 1969 layout featuring Ethel in the top row of a grid of 28 head shots of such legendary figures as Brigitte Bardot, Jackie O, and Truman Capote. She was officially a celebrity.

Dressed in a two-piece Saint Laurent, clutching a pair of sunglasses, I found myself sitting in front of Andy Warhol