Plaster Cornucopia

If an artist is judged by the company his work keeps, Peter Agostini is a pop sculptor. At the current sculpture exhibition in Manhattan's Jewish Museum, Agostini's plaster popovers are on show across from George Segal's plaster mummies. All summer long, some of his clustered plaster balloons hung, like monster grapes for a superbacchanalia, outside the New York State Pavilion at the World's Fair next to Robert Indiana's EAT sign, Roy Lichtenstein's cartoon, and Jim Rosenquist's billboard.

But neither by temperament, background nor age does Agostini count himself among pop artists. At 51, he can remember working for the WPA and showing on Manhattan's 10th Street when it was still the center of the avantgarde. Brought up as a poor Hell's Kitchen kid, he recalls selling his early drawings to the sisters at parochial school when he was eleven. His later friends were abstract expressionists of a generation older than pop: Kline, De Kooning and Marca-Relli. Pepperonis & Provolones. In his 30s and 40s Agostini began making commercial sculpture. He made plaster mannequins for a fashionable Manhattan women's store. This led him to sculpt pseudo-delicatessenry for the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps. He molded polyester salamis, pepperonis and meat loaves-stuff that by some pop values would be worth bundles, but

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