Tomorrow-Land (18 page)

18.

I feel I'm very much a part of my times, of my culture, as much a part of it as rockets and television.

—Andy Warhol

 

On April 28, 1963, Andy Warhol found himself at a small dinner party at a friend's downtown loft. Over a meal of coq au vin and white wine, the artist informed his fellow guests that he had a won a new commission from one of his collectors, the architect Philip Johnson, to create a twenty-by-twenty-foot mural for the 1964 World's Fair. It would be his first foray into public art and in the most public of settings: An estimated seventy million people—maybe more—were expected at the Fair. Millions would see his work. That was the good news; the bad news was that he lacked inspiration.

“Oh, I don't know what to do!” he complained.

Luckily for Warhol, his friend, the painter Wynn Chamberlain, who was hosting the dinner party, had a suggestion. “Andy, I have a great idea for you,” he said. “The Ten Most Wanted Men! You know, the mug shots the police issue of the ten most wanted men.” Not only did Chamberlain give Warhol the idea, but he would supply the source material: Wynn's boyfriend was a cop—a half-Irish, half-Italian, third-generation NYPD officer (and presumably deeply closeted)—who had access to mug shots, crime photos, anything Warhol needed.

“Oh, what a great idea!” Warhol said. However, the pop artist could already imagine the fallout with Fair officials over a mural of mug shots that was meant to hang on Johnson's postmodern New York State Pavilion—destined to be one of the Fair's most celebrated structures and signature attractions. What's more, he knew
exactly
which Fair official might object to such a mural. “Robert Moses has to approve it or something,” Warhol said. “I don't care, I'm going to do it!”

Warhol was one of ten New York–based artists that Johnson hired to create original works for the Fair; it was a veritable Who's Who of
the pop art world, which by then was remaking the landscape of the New York art scene: Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Ellsworth Kelly, John Chamberlain, James Rosenquist, Robert Indiana, Peter Agnostini, Alexander Liberman, Robert Mallary, and Warhol would bring their silk screens and collages, their comic book–inspired paintings and abstract sculptures, that celebrated—or mocked, depending on your point of view—commercial culture. By October 1963 news about the ten Johnson-commissioned “avant-garde” works had hit the papers. The
New York Times
gave brief descriptions of the pieces, including Warhol's most wanted men painting.

At the time, all Warhol had was a concept. Finally, in January 1964, the promised package from Chamberlain's cop boyfriend finally arrived at Warhol's West 47th Street silver-walled studio, the Factory. Inside a large manila envelope, he found archival material—a vast array of photos and a small booklet from the NYPD titled
The Thirteen Most Wanted
Men
. With the World's Fair only months away, Warhol got down to work.

Work was something that Andy Warhol was never shy about. Born Andrew Warhola in 1928 in Pittsburgh, the youngest and sickly son of Carpatho-Rusyn immigrant parents, Warhol grew up as a working-class outsider in a city best known for steel production. His family managed to send him to college, and he graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology with a degree in fine art before moving to New York City in 1949. He quickly shortened his name and just as quickly established himself as a reliable, if eccentric, commercial artist.

Warhol's first taste of success was illustrating shoe ads—whimsical, ornate drawings of women's footwear—for the I. Miller Shoe Company. Soon he had an impressive range of corporate clients, including Tiffany's, Bergdorf-Goodman, and Columbia Records, as well as important fashion bibles like
Vogue
and
Harper's Bazaar
. By 1957 his work was celebrated enough that
Life
featured a spread of his shoe drawings. However, Warhol's commercial work, while lucrative, wasn't deemed sophisticated. According to the prevailing sentiment at the time, commercial art was a fine day job but it wasn't Art. Other artists had toiled in the commercial art world to earn a living, but the artists on the pop vanguard seemed to
excel at it: Lichtenstein dressed windows (as did Warhol on occasion), while Rosenquist painted billboards.

Another reason Warhol's work won few accolades at the time was that the art world was still under the sway of abstract expressionism. The drip paintings of Jackson Pollock and the layered and colored abstractions of Willem de Kooning and others were considered the next great leap forward in painting after the great flourishing of modernism in the early twentieth century.

By 1958 the Museum of Modern Art was featuring a traveling exhibition titled
The
New American Painting
(curated by poet Frank O'Hara); soon thereafter New York was seen as the center of the art universe. Warhol made the most of the city's art scene, frequenting galleries, making connections with major players, and beginning to collect art, including works by Larry Rivers and Jasper Johns. At one show, Warhol considered buying a Rauschenberg collage but balked at the $250 price tag.

“I can do that myself,” said Warhol.

“Well, why don't you?” his friend replied.

He apparently took the advice to heart. By 1960 Warhol had created a series of paintings of comic strip characters: Superman, Popeye, and Dick Tracy. He also painted two large canvases, six by three feet, of Coke bottles in two different styles: The first had elements of abstract expressionism—hash marks, heavy globs of dripping black paint—while the other was a simple, straightforward, almost line-drawing of a Coke bottle. One afternoon he showed both to his friend, filmmaker Emile de Antonio, who dubbed the first “a piece of shit.” The second, de Antonio said, was different. It was something
new
. “[The second] is remarkable,” he told Warhol. “It's our society, it's who we are, it's absolutely beautiful and naked, and you ought to destroy the first one and show the other.” Years later, Warhol would write: “That afternoon was an important one for me.”

While turning such ephemeral or banal objects like Coke bottles and comic book characters into artistic subject matter may have seemed new, Warhol wasn't the first to do it. Rosenquist had painted images of 7 Up bottles, among other consumer products,
on his canvases, and
Lichtenstein had already created bold new paintings based on comic characters. (Lichtenstein's
Image Duplicator
was based on a comic panel drawn by Jack “The King” Kirby, the maestro of the Marvel Universe; soon thereafter the company's comics bore a new tagline: “Marvel Pop Art Productions.”)

Even before them, Rauschenberg—who along with Johns was considered pop's “old master”—had incorporated postcards, photographs, bits of wood, and fabric into his paintings he called “combines.” Meanwhile, Johns had painted familiar objects like the American flag and made bronze sculptures out of used Ballantine Beer cans. Now, however, such objects were worthy, serious subject matter. “I feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly,” Rauschenberg once explained, “because they're surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.”

Soon Warhol was painting the ultimate commodity: the dollar bill (and according to his critics, the object he cared about most). He then created a series of paintings based on a Campbell soup can, which he first displayed at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles that October. By then Warhol's lineage to pop art had been cemented in the pages of
Time
magazine. But Warhol wasn't content to be part of a movement that was already in motion: He pushed the envelope even further with his life-size silk screens of Elvis Presley (painted silver) and portraits of Marilyn Monroe, the celebrities that Warhol—like millions of other Americans—were so enamored with.

His Monroe pictures, including
Gold Marilyn Monroe
—a silk-screened publicity shot painted with a bright splash of color and surrounded in glittering gold like a Byzantine icon—were shown in November 1962 at Manhattan's Stable Gallery, Warhol's first solo New York show. The painting would become part of a larger series called “Death and Disaster” that was perfectly attuned to the times: images of movie stars and celebrities like Monroe (who had already died); Elizabeth Taylor (who was ailing and reportedly near death at the time); and Jackie Kennedy (both just before the assassination and later as a black-veiled, grieving widow at her husband's funeral). These images
hinted at the dark reality of American life in the early 1960s: On the surface was affluence and fame; below, death and suffering.

By 1963 Warhol was creating iconographic silk screens of still darker elements of the nation's life: car crashes, electric chairs, and police dogs attacking black activists in Birmingham—literally appropriating the day's news into his artwork. Sometimes, he took images directly from the media, as with his 1962
129 Die in Jet (Plane Crash),
a silk screen of the actual front page of the June 4, 1962, edition of the
New York Mirror
tabloid. By the time Johnson commissioned him to create a new original piece for the 1964 Fair, Warhol had established himself as an important practitioner of pop.

Not that everyone in Warhol's ever-expanding circle wanted him to take the job. Warhol got into “a real disagreement” with his friend Soren Agenoux, who thought that he should decline Johnson's commission because essentially it meant “working for Robert Moses,” remembered Billy Linich (better known by his Factory nom de plume, Billy Name). “Soren wanted him to refuse the commission, and Andy would just say, ‘Oh, Soren, I'm doing it, I need the money.' ”

When the work was done,
Thirteen Most Wanted Men
consisted of twenty-five Masonite panels featuring silk-screened images of twenty-two black-and-white mug shots of genuine thugs (three were intentionally left blank, perhaps to represent the “wanted men” who were exonerated or who were not yet hunted by the authorities); each was wanted for crimes like murder, assault, and burglary. Although the warrants for their arrest were old, as of February 1962 they were all on the NYPD's list. Shortly before opening day of the World's Fair, the piece, along with all the other pop artwork, was mounted onto the circular outer wall of the Theaterama of Johnson's pavilion—hailed as “the architectural delight of Flushing Meadows” according to Ada Louise Huxtable, the
Times
' acerbic architecture critic.

This was a prestigious pedestal for public art, particularly something as new and radical as pop art. Johnson was one of the most famous architects in America; by displaying these ten artists so prominently, he was giving pop his stamp of approval—and, in essence, the stamp of approval of New York
State and the World's Fair. He even managed to win a few converts to his way of thinking. John Canaday, the contrarian art critic for the
New York Times,
noted that by the spring of 1964, pop's staying power was causing “chronically advanced critics, who at first just couldn't see Pop” to reconsider their previously harsh judgment “as quickly as dignity will allow.”

Canaday was apparently one of the critics taking a second look. The inclusion of pop art on the New York State Pavilion, “potentially the most influential piece of architecture” at the Fair, he wrote, implied that “Pop is as legitimate to our situation as the statues of saints on the exteriors of Gothic cathedrals were to that of our ancestors.” From downtown renegades to mainstream sainthood in just a few years.

Not everyone was enamored with the pavilion's artwork, however . . . at least with Warhol's piece. On April 14, just eight days before the Fair threw open its gates, the
New York Journal-American
, the Hearst-owned evening paper—and one of the most pro-Moses papers in town—ran a front-page story that took aim squarely at Warhol's painting. Under a provocative tabloid headline—
Mural is Something Yegg-Stra
—the
Journal-American
stirred up another World's Fair art controversy. “Unabashedly adorning the New York State pavilion at the World's Fair today, resplendent in all their scars, cauliflower ears and other appurtenances of their trade—are the faces of the city's 13 Most Wanted Criminals,” the story reported.

A member of the city's Art Commission complained to the
Journal-American
: “I don't know who's in charge out there.” Since scores of New York City schoolchildren could tell any reporter who asked just who was in charge at Flushing Meadow, such a sentiment was a deliberate dig at Moses. A spokesman for New York's Finest confirmed the photos were real, but didn't know how Warhol had gotten his hands on them. Regardless of the complaints, Johnson told the paper that he was “delighted” with the work, dubbing it “a comment on the sociological factor in American life.” Furthermore, the famed architect explained, the carping of bureaucrats or policemen didn't matter. There was “no question about official complaints from any Fair authorities,” he claimed. “And if there were, we would not do anything about it.”

But just three days later, Johnson had an abrupt change of mind. Now the architect told reporters that Warhol's painting would be replaced, claiming that it was the artist himself who made the request. “[He] claims that the work was not properly installed and felt that it did not do justice to what he had in mind,” Johnson told the
Herald Tribune
's critic, Emily Genauer. “I've asked him to do another mural for the spot and knowing how quickly Warhol works, I'm sure we'll be able to put it up in time for the opening next Wednesday.”

The same day that Johnson was informing reporters of the mural's fate, Warhol wrote a letter to the New York State Department of Public Works authorizing Fair workers to paint over his mural “in a color suitable to the Architect.” Someone chose aluminum silver (a most Warholian choice) and covered the entire mural under a coat of house paint. Shortly thereafter Warhol trekked out to Queens to see what had become of his creation. “We went out to Flushing Meadow one day to see it, with the images just showing through like ghosts,” recalled Mark Lancaster, an assistant to Warhol at the time.
Thirteen Most Wanted Men
would continue to hang on the New York State Pavilion in a sort of ethereal half-life—its images erased, but not quite, by a coat of silver paint—for months. In its new form, the mural now seemed to become yet another painting, a sort of
Thirteen Most Wanted Men Painted Over
—a descendent of sorts of Rauschenberg's 1953 work
Erased
de Kooning
.