POPism Read Free

he’d like to keep two paintings in back room racks to show to Leo Castelli.
    Ivan, I found out, had started working for Castelli in ’59. “I was working with Martha Jackson then,” he told me, “andMichael Sonnabend came to me one day and said, ‘Ivan, you’re much too good for this, come have lunch with me and some friends.’ I said, ‘I’ll do anything for lunch.’ And it was the Carlyle, which I’d never been to, with very thick tablecloths and napkins, and standoffish, slightly disdainful waiters, and I’ll do anything for a lunch like that, so I went to work for Leo Castelli, who was then still married to Ileana. [She later became Ileana Sonnabend.] With my first paycheck, I bought a new suit.”
    Leo had an art history background and a very good visual sense, but it was Ivan who got him to be adventurous, to poke around new artists’ studios. Ivan was young and open to new possibilities; he wasn’t locked into any strict art philosophy.
    Ivan managed to be “light” without being frivolous. And he was so good with words. His whole manner was like a witty aside, and people loved it. His loose, personal style of art dealing went perfectly with the Pop Art style. Years later I figured out why he was such a successful art dealer—this may sound strange, but I believe it was because art was his second love. He seemed to love literature more, and he put the serious side of his nature into that. During the sixties he wrote
five novels
—that’s a lot of writing. Some people are even better at their second love than their first, maybe because when they care too much, it freezes them, but knowing there’s something they’d rather be doing gives them a certain freedom. Anyway, that’s my theory about Ivan’s success.
    In the late post–Abstract Expressionist days, the days right before Pop, there were only a few people in the art world who knew who was good, and the people who were good knew who else was good. It was all like private information; the art public hadn’t picked up on it yet. One incident especially brought home to me how low the general art world awareness was.
    De had met Frank Stella when Frank was an undergraduate at Princeton, and they had stayed good friends. (De reminded me that he’d once brought Frank to my house and I’d pointed at a small painting of his that he had with him and said, “I’ll take six of those.” I don’t remember that, but it must have happened, because I do have six of that painting.) One of Frank’s black paintings hung in De’s apartment on East 92nd Street. Around the corner from De lived a famous psychiatrist couple who I’ll call Hildegarde and Irwin. They were what’s known as straight eclectic Freudians. I tagged along with De to a few parties that they gave, and those parties were just remarkable: the guests who weren’t psychiatrists were all black people from the UN or UNESCO—“all do-gooding groups,” as De put it. He used to laugh and swear that over the years, at all of their parties combined, “I’ve met exactly
one
attractive woman; they’re a terrible-looking group of people.”
    One afternoon I decided to stop by De’s, and just as I got to the door, he was opening it and telling Hildegarde and another woman, a friend of hers who lived down the street, “Get out! I never want to see you again!” I couldn’t figure out what was going on, because he and Hildegarde were very good friends, so I just walked on into the apartment as they walked on out. It was a beautiful snowy day; the windows were open and the snow was blowing in.
    De explained to me that it had all started with Hildegarde pointing over at the Stella on the wall and sneering, “What’s that?” De had told her, “It’s a painting by a friend of mine.” She and her friend had burst out