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Robert Scull (1917-1986) was a prominent New York City and Connecticut collector of contemporary American art primarily during the 1960s.
Robert Scull was born in Manhattan's Lower East Side. He dropped out of high school during the Depression and did various jobs while also taking art courses. He later became a freelance illustrator and industrial designer. When his wife Ethel's father died, the couple inherited a successful taxi business which Scull expanded into the Super Operating Corporation with a fleet of 130 cabs.
Throughout the 1960s, Robert and Ethel Scull were avid art collectors who acquired contemporary American art works through dealers Richard Bellamy and Leo Castelli. Robert Scull's patronage also helped fund art dealer Richard Bellamy's Green Gallery in New York City for five years. Initially the Sculls focused on collecting American Abstract Expressionists and owned works by Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and others. In 1965, the couple held their first auction and part of the profits helped establish the Robert and Ethel Scull Foundation, dedicated to financially assisting upcoming artists. The foundation commissioned environmental works from Michael Heizer and Walter de Maria and gave the artists stipends and even bought them food and supplies.
Around the mid-1960s, the Sculls also began collecting Pop Art and acquired the works of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol. In 1973, the couple sold 50 works from their personal collection of Pop Art through a Sotheby's auction that yielded $2.2 million - record-breaking for sales of contemporary American art. The Sculls were criticized of social-climbing and profiteering by various people in the media and art world, including the artist Robert Rauschenberg.
In 1975, Robert Scull divorced Ethel and in 1978 he founded the Robert C. Scull Foundation which again assisted younger artists and arts organizations with a focus on contemporary art. Scull remarried and sold his taxi business sometime in the early 1980s, and moved to Warren, Connecticut. He died in 1986.
In 2010, the exhibition Robert and Ethel Scull: Portrait of a Collection was held at Acquavella Galleries in Manhattan.
