THE NW Scull Sum 10:Layout 1 6/21/10 3:25 PM Page 2 N E WS L E H T E F O T F I G , K R O Y W E N , T R A F O M U E S U M N A T I L O P O R T E M E H T D N A K R O Y W E N , T R A N A C I R E M A F O M U E S U M Y E N T I H W L Ethel Scull 36 E H T Times , 1963, was Y B D The Five-Year Plan Andy Warhol’s first E N W O commissioned Y L How the Met and the Whitney came to share an iconic Warhol T portrait. N I O J / K BY ANN LANDI R O Y W E N , ) oint-custody arrangements for chil - $2.2 million and earning the enmity of she should do with the portrait, and he S R A ( dren are commonplace when cou - the art world. recommended giving it to the Whitney Y T E I ples divorce, but works of art But a decade before the honeymoon Museum, which had shown his portraits C O S J rarely get shuttled between two homes. was over, Scull hired Warhol to paint from the ’70s in a spectacular exhibi - S T H Yet such is the case with Andy Warhol’s his wife’s likeness as a present for her tion. When Ethel landed in the hospital G I R Ethel Scull 36 Times (1963), a pivotal 42nd birthday. This was Warhol’s first for back surgery, in 1984, Whitney S T T S I R T A example of Warhol portraiture and one commissioned portrait and his first director Tom Armstrong sent curator R F A / O S of the masterpieces of Pop art included montage-style painting, composed of Patterson Sims to Ethel’s bedside to ask T M R U A E S in the recent exhibition “Robert & three dozen images of Ethel based on her to go over the papers and formally L U A U M S Ethel Scull: Portrait of a Collection” at shots snapped in a Times Square photo make a gift of the work. I N V A T E I L Acqua vella Galleries in New York. A booth, where the artist acted as direc - “She said, effectively, ‘How do you H T O P R O self-made millionaire who built a taxi tor, coaxing his subject into a series of think Bob will feel about my giving this O R F T N E empire after going into business with flirtatious poses. “Andy and Ethel were work away?’” Sims, now a freelance O M I T 1 A 0 D his father-in-law, Robert Scull in many enjoying themselves,” curator Judith curator and writer, recalls. “And I said, 0 2 N U © ways created the market for Pop, snap - Goldman writes in the exhibition cata - ‘Well, I think he’s probably going to be O O F T L O O ping up the whole of Jasper Johns’s logue, “two kindred spirits who coveted very angry.’” At which point she signed H H P / R 1 A first show and lending support to social celebrity and loved fashion.” off on documents bestowing the por - 0 0 W 2 Y , D James Rosenquist and John Chamber - Soon after the auction, the Sculls trait as a partial and promised gift to L L N U A C lain early in their careers. Then he entered into a bitter divorce battle that the museum. E S H T R E unloaded many of the works at auction raged until Robert’s death, in 1986. In But after Robert’s death, two years 0 N 1 0 D 2 E R in 1973, raking in a cool (for the times) the early ’80s, Ethel asked Warhol what later, Armstrong got a call from Ashton © 54 Summer 2010 ARTnews THE NW Scull Sum 10:Layout 1 6/21/10 3:25 PM Page 3 Hawkins, then-general counsel and executive vice president at the Metro - politan Museum of Art, who told him that the taxi tycoon had left the portrait to the Met. As Armstrong remembers the conversation, Hawkins said, “’I’m sending a truck for our painting.’ And I said, ‘Well, it isn’t your painting, Ashton.’” After Scull died, Armstrong claims, the portrait was not in his inven - tory, or in his will. “As far as I know, no one has ever seen a document that gives this portrait to the Met,” he adds. When Armstrong, who is now a con - sultant at Sotheby’s, took the matter to the Whitney’s board, then-president William S. Woodside said he would handle the dispute. “So alone,” says Armstrong, “without taking me or any - one else, he went to the Metropolitan Museum and met with Punch Sulz - berger. He returned from that visit and said, ‘We’re sharing the painting.’ And that was it. He gave it away, and I felt there was nothing I could do about it.” Asked if Woodside was cowed by the Met’s board president, Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger, who was president and publisher of the New York Times , Armstrong responds, “Let’s just say he was compromised.” Armstrong insists that the portrait was not in Scull’s estate. “I’m quite sure of that, and secondly it wasn’t his, so he couldn’t give it away. It was a gift from him to her. It’s like my giving you the Brooklyn Bridge.” Hawkins, however, recalls that there was indeed a will. “It was obviously bequeathed to us because otherwise there would be no discussion.” But in another interview, he noted, “We want - ed to do the right thing. Everybody wanted to do the right thing.” And thus, by the terms of an agree - ment reached out of court in 1989, the painting divides its time, five years at a stretch, between the Met and the Whit - ney. “The greater good for the public is probably for the two institutions to own the portrait,” Armstrong admits now, “because two dissimilar publics are going to see it.” I Ann Landi is a contributing editor of ARTnews . ARTnews Summer 2010 55.