The Collector: Robert and Ethel Scull
The Collector08.15.2025
In the 1950s, Robert and Ethel Scull began assembling a dazzling collection of Abstract Expressionist pieces. Their funding came from a taxi business inherited from Ethel’s father, which they referred to as Scull’s Angels. In the early ’60s they backed Richard Bellamy’s Green Gallery, which highlighted emerging artists like Mark di Suvero and Donald Judd. Founded in 1965, the Robert and Ethel Scull Foundation gave artists stipends, paid for materials, and commissioned environmental and conceptual works by artists like Walter de Maria and Michael Heizer.
On October 18, 1973, the couple sold 50 works from their personal collection at Sotheby Parke Bernet, in an auction that brought in $2.2 million, breaking records for contemporary American art and heralding an increasingly commercialized art market. The infamous event brought renewed attention to contemporary art as a potentially lucrative investment and sparked discussion of artist resale rights. Works by the largely unknown Jasper Johns set five different auction records. A pair of cylinders painted to look like beer cans, “Painted Bronze,” sold for $90,000, establishing a new auction record for sculpture by a living American artist. Claes Oldenburg's “The Stove,” at $45,000, had held the record since 1970.
Prior to the sale, the Sculls (who divorced in 1975) lived alongside these masterpieces in their New York City apartment at 1010 Fifth Avenue. Barnett Newman’s “White Fire II” and Willem de Kooning’s “Police Gazette” were among the works shown below that were included in the 1973 sale.
Image: The entryway of the Scull home featured a George Segal sculpture of curator and critic Henry Geldzahler, Robert Indiana's "The Demuth Five" (1963), Morris Louis' "Prophecy" (1961), and Claes Oldenburg's "The Stove" (1962).
