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pure and personal very impure.  Anyway, it is psychologically difficult.  I sold the paintings through Sidney Janis's gallery. After a while, that did not work out, and I had to make the back half of my apartment into a gallery." (Sidney Janis was then, and is now, one of the most successful and influential New York dealers in contemporary art, and a close friend of Castelli's.)

Castelli's unease in describing what was obviously an unpleasant dispute over money with Janis was apparent to me, and it reflected a characteristic unusual in the art world, which is as full of gossip and backbiting as the theater: he exerts the greatest self-control to keep from making harsh or malicious comments about people.  About an egomaniacal collector, Castelli showed heroic control.  "Yes, I suppose there are certain characteristics about him which are a little trying.  But he has the eye; you have to give him credit for the eye, he is most sensitive."  On the other hand, a well-known woman critic managed to breach his controlled demeanor.  "She is merely stupid, stupid," he muttered distractedly, as if surprised to find himself outwitted by his feelings.

It does not happen often.  Whenever people make critical comments about him, he finds an excuse for them.  Castelli learned, for instance, that an old friend, an artist who had been a member of his gallery, refused to speak with me for fear of saying too many unkind things about him, "I don't know why that stopped him.  I wouldn't have been angry.  Perhaps he feels I could have done more for him when he was with me.  Other painters he knows have grown more successful.  I guess he blames his lack of success a little bit on me. Who knows?"

The gallery Castelli finally opened, in 1957, was on the fourth floor of the building in which his current gallery now occupies the second - a handsome old white mansion on East 77th Street, two doors from Fifth Avenue.  Many dealers have made the step from collector, and all record the wrench, the intrusion of commerce and calculation into love.  "At first, it seems intolerable to lose these painting s you have loved - to sell them to strangers," says Castelli.  "But there is a new pleasure; you begin to enjoy the other person's pleasure in them.  And then, too, there is the simple pleasure of making a business go."

But in the beginning, the business did not go.  The big money was just then coming into the art world.  Jackson Pollock had died the year before, and his death drew his own and other prices up, intensifying the boom. But it was not until 1958 and 1959 that growth in the art market really became apparent.  For several years, Castelli lived by selling his collection.  Then, two of his painters began to sell - Johns and Rauschenberg, who are considered the immediate fathers of the great upsurge of Pop art that swept the country during the last three or four years.  They had both joined Castelli shortly after he opened his fourth-floor gallery.  And not long after that, both were taken up by museums and collectors - Johns especially, for he is more a favorite of the influential Museum of Modern Art.  You may have to wait in line for a Johns; up until 1963, there was rarely a shortage of Rauschenbergs, though many have accused Catelli of being a master at creating an artificial shortage. (One dealer said, "He made Rauschenbergs seem like bottles of Dewar's during the war, when I happen to know he had a dozen in his back room.")  The important thing is that Castelli backed these young men before they were hot - touted them and supported them with his money. "He is," says Solomon, the Biennale commissioner, who was also formerly the director of the Jewish Museum, "one of the few dealers with a real commitment.  Most of them are just businessmen.  Leo knows and loves painting.  Painting comes first, not making money."  Allan Stone, a younger dealer who admires Castelli and who frankly says he made the jump from collector to dealer in emulation of Castelli, divides gallery owners into auto dealers and chess

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