Viewing page 8 of 13

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

INTERVIEW WITH LEO COSTELLI 8-8-8

is to [[strikethrough]] re [[\strikethrough]] sale them. First they were only ten dollars, but then they went up, because after all, a Lichtenstein poster with a Lichtenstein signature is worth more than ten dollars. And so little by little they went up, twenty, thirty, and we get fif [[strikethrough]] e [[\strikethrough]] ty dollars for the real ones now. Then I have done commission posters for the Lincoln Center, for all kinds of things. They are made also in Europe; several [[strikethrough]] Russian pictures [[/strikethrough]] Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein shows also outside... So that there is an incredible number of posters done by my artists done on all sorts of occassions [[occasions]] and little by little people started following this poster idea of mine. Now lately I haven't been doing so many posters because [[strikethrough]] Lichtenstein [[\strikethrough]] Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns and Roy and everybody got tired of them. So they didn't want to do them anymore. So there is a [[strikethrough]] dark [[/strikethrough]] gap that is occurring in my poster activities for two years, and I still do some here and there, but not many. Since I introduced the poster idea in Europe and you see them when there is a show in Paris or at the Deux Maggots, and I thought that we should do the same thing here and I started doing them seriously in 1962. But even in the beginning there was only one artist's poster to begin with and then it became eighty posters.

MRS.V.: I see. How long have you been in  business?

MR.C.: This gallery exists since February 1, 1957, it has been around as this gallery for little over twelve years now. But I've been in this particular kind of business since 1938. It was in Paris very briefly, then the war came, and the gallery I had there was closed when the war broke out. It didn't open agan until the end of the war. And then in 1949 things were going very, very badly and I had a few good paintings there, and I decided not to lose everything. So I liquidated my participation in it and got at least a few paintings out, which were DuBuffy, and sculptures by '? and some Kandinskys. Not much, I didn't get much out of it. If I had those things still around [[strikethrough]] d [[/strikethrough]] today, I would have [[strikethrough]] millions [[/strikethrough]] a tremendous amt of money. But just to give an example; I had an, five DuBuffys maybe, very early ones, '35-'36 ones, each one of them would be worth over $60,000. now. And there were five of them so that's $300,000. there. And there was a [[strikethrough]] Besnes [[/strikethrough]] Pevsner sculpture that would be worth about $100,000. There was a Kandinsky probably sixty, seventy thousand dollars. There was this very small representation of paintings that at at time was worth ten or fifteen

(more)