Tomorrow-Land

by Joseph Tirella

  The outcry from the Times’ follow-up article—Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police—was immediate. The New York papers seized on the sensational story, as the populace of Kew Gardens now had to answer for the actions—or lack thereof—of its three-dozen silent witnesses. The article, assigned by Rosenthal to a young reporter named Martin Gansberg, prompted New Yorkers throughout the five boroughs to ask some difficult questions about themselves and their metropolis. When had New York devolved into a bloody battleground of life and death? When had America’s most modern and cultured urban society become so depraved? What was wrong with New York?

  Citizens, clergy, politicians, journalists, and psychologists offered numerous opinions in an attempt to explain the horrible crime, and the larger issues it invoked. President Johnson mentioned it in a radio address, as the murder of Genovese quickly became a symbol of all that was wrong with America’s cities. The silence of those thirty-eight witnesses would be debated for decades to come; sociologists even gave a name to this new disease that was infecting urban America: Genovese syndrome.

  The perception of New York—among its own eight million citizens, the nation, and the world—would never be the same. Newspapers from Moscow to Istanbul recounted the indifference to human suffering that was on display in Queens, the home borough of the World’s Fair, whose self-proclaimed mission was to foster a new era of “Peace Through Understanding.” The murder of Genovese mocked such utopian schemes.

  As the weeks and months passed, long after the Fair’s opening day, the story refused to die; radio and television, newspapers and magazines delivered a constant barrage of “apathy” stories. “It’s as if everybody in New York were watching to see how apathetic everybody else was,” Rosenthal told The New Yorker, after publishing a short book on the crime. “Maybe ‘apathy’ isn’t the right word after all. Maybe it should be ‘callousness’ or ‘dissociation.’ Whatever it is, there seem to be an awful lot of people who have been turning away from this or that. People don’t seem to be connected to other people any more.”

  With 1964 being an election year, it was only a matter of time before crafty politicos seized upon the story to drive the narratives that benefited their ambitions. Alabama’s segregationist governor, George C. Wallace, who entered the Democratic presidential race in a bid to wrest the nomination from President Johnson, began to allude to urban America’s soaring crime rates. The fact that Genovese’s assailant—who quickly confessed to murdering two other Queens women—was black, a fact the Times left unreported, was used by Wallace and the defenders of Jim Crow to inflame tension between the races.

  Back at his Flushing Meadow office, Robert Moses began receiving letters from frightened Americans too scared to travel to New York to see his Fair. Moses assured them that, yes, terrible crimes did transpire in New York, but that local journalists had overplayed such tawdry tales in a bid to sell newspapers. Accusing his enemies in the press of sensationalism in order to sell more copies of their ailing newspapers, such reporting “creates a picture of conditions in New York City at variance with the facts,” Moses explained in a letter to a gentleman from Virginia. “This does the city, the Fair and the Country a great disservice.” Crime in New York, he noted, was less than other “large cities.”

  That wasn’t saying much. Violent crime had doubled from 1963 to 1964, and urban violence would continue to soar from coast to coast throughout the 1960s and beyond. And despite Moses’ warnings, the specter of Genovese—and the silent eyewitnesses to her death—would haunt New York long after the World’s Fair and all its wonders were just distant memories.

  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 Wille
m 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.” Furthe
rmore, 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.

  Warhol’s mural and its audacious subject matter should have come as no surprise to anyone; its contents were public knowledge as far back as October 1963. Some more conservative critics had even lodged complaints with Moses, Mayor Robert Wagner, and Governor Nelson Rockefeller. But it wasn’t until Thirteen Most Wanted Men was hung on the facade of Johnson’s pavilion that anyone seemed to notice the incongruity of displaying the stiff-necked mugs of hardened criminals and alledged mafiosi—at least one of whom claimed that he “would never be taken alive”—on a structure created to extol the cultural and ecological virtues of the Empire State to millions of tourists. Like all pavilions at the World’s Fair, the $11 million New York State Pavilion had something to sell: itself.