Paul Schuster's Art Gallery

One of the pleasantest places in the Square to waste an idle hour or so in conversation and looking around is Schuster's Art Gallery on Palmer Street, behind the Coop. The Gallery is in the loft of an old paint shop and it bears many scars of its early career. Ethereal verse occasionally seeps through the wall from the Poet's Theatre and various raven-haired avant-garde types waft in and out on various clouds.

The shop is filled with a conglomeration of exotic glue pots, picture frames, the smell of turpentine, prints from the Ming Dynasty, welded metal sculpture, mobiles, folk pottery, and usually an exhibition of the most abstract of abstracts by one young artist or another. Paul has recently come down to earth with a small shop on the street level devoted entirely to ceramics. His personality can be felt everywhere in a quiet, yet intense sort of way as he arranges things or looks up as someone comes in the door.

He says he enjoys browsers who like the sort of things that he carries and wishes more people would wander upstairs and just leaf through prints and talk. He finds the students very interested in art, but he wishes that they wouldn't let the awe of art galleries keep them from coming in and perhaps buying something small that they might like rather than cheap prints. "There's nothing like an original."

The gallery was the only commercial gallery in Cambridge when he opened it up six years ago. Then he says, he could step out for a cup of coffee almost any time, but now he never can because someone always comes in. "One person tells another about the place. That's the best kind of advertising."

He doesn't believe in popularizing art, but rather in letting people come in and find something that satisfies their own taste, perhaps something a little off-beat. He likes Cambridge very much and half-regrets the changes and shiny-new buildings.

Quite a voyager, Paul joined the Norwegian Merchant Marine when he finished high school in New Jersey. During the war, he was in one of the last units of the US Cavalry and was shipped to India, China and Burma. After the war he studied painting in Spain under the GI Bill for a couple of years. He doesn't have time for much of his own work any more. "I get more of a kick showing off other people's work. And really, I don't care whether someone buys a painting or not, but I'd rather see it in a good home where it will be enjoyed."