Rethinking Pop

As the person who worked closely with art dealer John Bernard Myers when he was compiling his memoirs, I want to respond to Christopher Knight’s Jan. 19 article about rethinking Pop art (“Andy Warhol & Company--Rethinking the Art of the Sell”).

There can be little doubt that Myers and many of his contemporaries were stymied and affronted by the Pop movement. (He found little of value in the early rumblings of Minimalism as well.)

More importantly, it should be pointed out that Myers took a dim view of Warhol as a person as well as a painter. He considered Warhol Pop to be a drug response more than anything else and found his personality to be both vapid and ridiculously self-aggrandizing.

Gay or non-gay art was hardly a criterion when it came to seeking talent to represent. What he did seek had to do with a kind of intellectual musculature as well as an innate sexiness and sense of humor. But his taste certainly transcended conventional stereotypes, as, one hopes, all good basic thinking about art and life does.

LAWRENCE LOTT, New York

Knight, in giving an example of art-world sentiment against homosexuals in the 1950s, cited Myers’ memoirs. Myers wrote that painter Helen Frankenthaler left Myers’ gallery in 1958 because her artist - husband, Robert Motherwell, did not approve of his wife being represented by a homosexual.