There's No Business Like . . .

EDWARD COOPER doesn't like his job because he's an artist as well as a businessman. When his wife died four years ago, he took the position of director of a non-profit art gallery because he "had nothing better to do." Now, he works overtime without pay. He drinks too much instant coffee by day and gin and tonics at night to get him through it.

Last week, Cooper's Cambridge Art Association held its annual prize show. Most of the contestants were women. One-hundred forty works were ferried in the back seat with the kids from Belmont, Newton and Brookline to the small gallery near Cambridge Common.

Cooper makes sure that each artist has paid her $20 membership fee and $2 entry fee. Each artist makes sure that she rests in Cooper's affection. "They all use me," says Cooper, "because they think I can sell their work. All they want is to sell something. For their ego. They don't need the money."

That night, the judges, two professors from local colleges, select forty-five works in different media. Cooper comments afterwards that one of the judges must have been color-blind--the one that awarded a prize to a large constructed painting. The painting consists of two semi-circular canvases in between which four oblong panels dangle from brightly colored plastic chains. On each panel is the letter L, O, V or E, each in a different loud color. Over the letters are painted objects like sea shells and flowers.

Cooper's over-fifty double chin and over-the-belt bulge go well with his British accent. But, his Anglophilic decorum seems incongruous among the insistent telephone calls and the stream of ambitious go-go-booted women who curtly pick up their rejected works. "The divorcees always invite me to their homes," he complains. "I usually refuse. One woman sends me obscene letters. Once she invited me to take a bath with her. I stopped reading her letters until she started writing about all the women who were trying to get me fired. Why? Because I didn't sell their work. But, I can't sell it. Art sells itself."

Despite the frustrations of accomodation, Cooper is one of the few successful art dealers left in Harvard Square. Though the intellectual atmosphere of the university community would seem likely to support a thriving art trade, the truth is quite the opposite. In the past year, at least four galleries have had to close down, and the few that have managed to survive have often had to trade off quality for prosperity.

ON BOLYSTON ST., Charlotte Salter is one dealer who's pleased with the profits and promise of her gallery. She and a friend, Eleanor Robbins, started the Off the Square Gallery eight years ago, exhibiting, at that time, the work of young art students. "Now," Salter confides, "the gallery has established a stable of artists." Such a metaphor makes one wonder exactly how their works could be described.

Salter is proud of the most expensive painting she has in the gallery, a landscape for $2500. It is a large canvas in a pseudo-Impressionist blurred style. The colors are muddy and depressing. The paint is so needlessly crusted that it makes you want to pick it off.

But, Salter and her friend have a shrewd sense of business--if not art. They know that a gallery can't survive by just selling a few expensive paintings each month. So they buy prints and water colors from local artists which they think will appeal to students. These are cheap, often cute, occasionally psychedelic--reminescent of the art you stare at glassy-eyed in a dentist's office. Salter says they sell very well.

Around the corner, Bernheimer's Antique Arts looks like a bargain basement--until you turn over the price tags. Located beneath an antique store at 52c Brattle St., the one-room shop is a disarray of antiquities, antiques, and African objects.

On a table are sprawled what appear to have been a pile of Japanese prints. A basket precariously holds pieces of ancient pottery on sale. Display cases are filled with roughly categorized objects in poor condition, dirty, or in need of repairs. Everything looks antique.

Bernheimer smiles nervously with long triangular teeth stained at the top, and speaks through them with a thick, breathy German accent. When asked how he authenticates such a wide variety of objects, he quickly retorts, "How does a doctor know his patient is sick?"

Bernheimer never knows where his next piece will come from--he says he can find anything a customer wants. He sells everything from a wooden Upper Volta Bobo ladel for $240 to an 18th century Americana rocking horse for $450. In typical disorder, one case holds both a small Archaic Sassanian plate for $750 and an 18th century enamel pill box for $69.

Bernheimer says that his "family has been in the business since the late 18th century." Raised and educated in Europe, he himself has been in the business for over 50 years. In fact, walking around the shop is almost an educational experience; one learns, at least, Bernheimer's interpretation of history. Along the wall sits a fragment of a stone frieze from a temple with a carved Buddha whose head has been knocked off. On Bernheimer's tag is scrawled an explanation: "Face of Buddha probably destroyed during Mogul invasion." On the other side of the tag is the price--$1750.

FOR MANY OTHER Cambridge art galleries, the only remnants of their existence are defunct listings in the Yellow Pages. The shop which used to house Perspectives on Mass Ave. is now a crafts shop. The Paul Shuster Art Gallery on Mt. Auburn St. is now a photograph enlarger, the Big Picture.

For those art galleries which are failing, a sign on the door is the only spokesman. One reads, "By Appointment Only." Another, on the door of Art Explorers near Porter Square, reads: "Saturdays 10:30 - 5:30/Also open other unannounced times/If you see someone inside, come in."

But there's no one inside. The displays are sparse. On the wall which holds a few unimpressive Japanese prints of animals is another sign: "$7 first print, $6 second print." Tacked everywhere are papers proclaiming discounts, like the last day of a month-long clearance sale.

Along the construction site across from the post office on Mt. Auburn St. is a brightly colored mural painted by children from a Watertown elementary school. Parts of the mural advertise banks and plead for crime and pollution prevention; among them is one which reads "Visit the Art Galleries of Harvard Square."

But the exhortation has the same sort of naivete as the Harvard freshman has who expects to spend his evenings in Cambridge leaning meaningfully over cheap coffee in basement bohemian cafes. The atmosphere lover soon finds he must pay for his passions with cover charges or inflated prices.

In Harvard Square, most surviving art, like most coffee, is big business. Many art galleries just can't make it. And the ones that do often find that success depends on selling out to supporters, greed or just plain bad taste.