Andy Warhol | The Thirteen Most Wanted Men (Dossier No 2357)

Andy Warhol

The Thirteen Most Wanted Men (Dossier No 2357)

Paris, France: Sonnabend Gallery, 1967

27 × 18 cm.

Edition size unknown

Andy Warhol reportedly only produced a single public artwork in his lifetime, and it was on display for less than forty-eight hours. 

New York State Governor Nelson Rockefeller had invited architect Philip Johnson to design the New York State Pavilion for the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Johnson identified ten then-nascent artists and commissioned them to produce works to adorn the exterior of the Pavilion’s circular Theaterama: Peter Agostini, John Chamberlain, Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Alexander Lieberman, Robert Mallary, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist and Warhol. 

Lichtenstein contributed a laughing comic-strip woman leaning out a window, Rauschenberg created a collage of 1960's American history featuring President Kennedy called Skyway,  Kelly paired large curved monochromatic forms, and Indiana contributed a blinking sign that read “EAT.” 

Warhol proposed something a little more controversial. 

After initially being stumped by the project (and enraging Ray Johnson by offering him money conceive of a work for him) Warhol stumbled into a premise he could get excited about. 

John Giorno attributes the idea to painter Wynn Chamberlain, who was dating an NYPD officer at the time. Chamberlain was said to have provided Warhol with a large envelope filled with various archival crime photographs and mug shots. 

Warhol loved it, as it allowed him to cross-reference the celebrity portraits he had been making (Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe - the latter of which Johnson had recently purchased) with the darker subject matter of his Death and Disaster scenes. 

He elected to enlarge thirteen of them, which were silkscreened onto square Masonite panels, and tiled together. The work was installed on April 15, 1964, and triggered numerous objections. It was painted over two days later, before the event had opened. 

Press reports from the time initially suggested that Warhol was dissatisfied with the installation but it was later revealed that Rockefeller - no stranger to censoring artists - himself had demanded the work be removed. In addition to the piece featuring thugs and criminals (a baby killer among them) seven of the men were Italian and the governor balked at alienating that community while running for re-election. 

A 2014 exhibition commemorating the saga featured a telegram from Warhol to the NY State Dept of Public Works,  giving permission to paint over the canvas:

Gentlemen:

This serves to confirm that you are hereby authorized to paint over my mural in the New York State Pavilion in a color suitable to the architect.

Very truly yours,

Andrew Warhol

Other accounts cite Warhol's choice of silver paint being related to his tin foil and mirror covered walls at the Factory, which he was putting together at the time. 

Warhol also produced a replacement for the mural, 25 identical Masonite panels each depicting the smiling face of World’s Fair President Robert Moses, who was likely to have been thought of as the main censor to the project at the time. It was never installed and its whereabouts are currently unknown. 

A couple of years later he revisited the 13 Most Wanted screens, using them to produce a series of diptych paintings on canvas, which were exhibited at the Sonnabend Gallery in Paris. This publication - rare enough to not be included in the multi-volume catalogue raisonné - is from that exhibition. It includes six loose leaves featuring exhibition documentation, a text by Otto Hahn and a silkscreen portrait of Most Wanted Men No. 11, John Joseph H., Jr.

Warhol enjoyed a good double-entendre and the use of the word "Wanted" in the title undoubtedly referred not only to the criminals' fugitive status, but also their desirability and potential to be seen as 

heartthrobs. A later work,  the screen test film The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys - makes the connection clearer. 

Morrissey carried this torch forward, with his use of vintage portraits repurposed as album cover art and band shirt graphics, as well as his glamorization of criminals such as the Kray Twins ("The Last of the Famous International Playboys"). 

In terms of the public display of this type of imagery, the work anticipates the practice of Braco Dimitrijević’s by a decade or so. Dimitrijević’s Casual Passer-by series featured very large close-up photographic portraits of everyday people, hung on the sides of buildings or as billboards in various European and American cities. "I Stopped the first man i saw in the street,” he recounted, “and explained to him what my work was and then asked him to be the model for the foto".

Note: Robert Indiana's project was also 'censored' from the fair shortly after it opened. Apparently his EAT sign was misconstrued by fair goers as an announcement that the building contained a food court [see below].

“In April 1964 Warhol had a fight with the architect Philip Johnson, who had commissioned him to do a mural for the American pavilion at that summer’s World’s Fair in New York. Andy had delivered a 20 by 20 foot black and white mural called The Thirteen Most Wanted Men based on a series of mugshots of criminals. It had been installed beside works by Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein and Indiana. On 16 April, however, Johnson informed Warhol that he had twenty-four hours to replace or remove the piece since word had come from the governor that the painting might be insulting to some of his Italian constituents, because most of the thirteen criminals were Italian. When Andy suggested he replace it with large pictures of the fair’s head Robert Moses, Johnson ‘forbade that because I didn’t think it made any sense to thumb our noses at Mr Moses and I thought it was in very bad taste. Andy and I had a little battle at the time.’ On 17 April Warhol went out to the fair with Malanga and Geldzahler and spitefully instructed his mural be ‘painted over silver and that’ll be my art’.

“The following day the New York Times featured an article about how many people had been robbed at the Fair. ‘It was so shocking a mural and mirror of the actual society,’ Allen Ginsberg said, ‘they refused it. When the searchlight of his mind came into that particular area, one could see how revolutionary the insight was.”

- Victor Bockris, Warhol

Keith Haring and Andy Warhol play with nine year old Sean Lennon’s Computer

 

“Tuesday, October 9, 1984

I made up some things for Sean Lennon’s birthday and the painting was still wet—a little heart candy-box that said “I love you”—and I also brought a “paint brush” that instead of bristles had strips of red colored paper in a stack. And a bracelet I’d made out of pennies. PH picked me up and we went to the Dakota (cab $6.50). There were fans outside in honor of the day still on the “vigil.” Because the ninth is Sean and John’s birthday. Inside Yoko’s door everybody had taken their shoes off so there was a line of shoes. I wouldn’t take mine off, though, and I didn’t want PH to, either, so that I wouldn’t be alone. PH said that when she went to the Royal Palace once in Hawaii that the tour guides gave you booties to put over your shoes and that would be a better way to keep the house clean, I think. So then when we heard a glass drop and break, that was our excuse—that we didn’t want to be in our socks when there might be glass. 

Yoko ran to call Sean and he came in and said, “Did you bring my dollar?” Yoko said that he’d been remembering and wanting the other half of the dollar I tore in half the last time. So I gave him a whole bunch of torn bills that I’d brought for him and he went off to try to find the match to the half he had. Keith was there and he brought Kenny Scharf as his date. Walter Cronkite was there, and John Cage and Louise Nevelson and Lisa Robinson. On purpose for fun I had spelled Sean’s name “Shawn” on a couple of his gifts, and so when Sean autographed napkins for me he signed it that way, too. He was wearing Michael Jackson-type gloves, but on both hands, that his friend little Max Leroy, Warner Leroy’s son, had given him. Michael Jackson is his favorite singer. He said he likes Prince, too, and he must like Boy George, too, because later on his computer he did a drawing of Boy George. Sean and Keith hit it off. Keith is very good playing with kids—he was playing really “well with another baby that was there, too, coming after her with a stuffed animal. Sean sat between me and Roberta Flack. The cake was a big blond grand piano. Sean was the one who had the idea that it should be a piano. He has a piano in his bedroom. And he cut the cake. Harry Nilsson led everyone singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” and later Sean made a really nice speech and said that if his father were there we’d be singing ‘Tor They’re Jolly Good Fellows”

We went into Sean’s bedroom—and there was a kid there setting up the Apple computer that Sean had gotten as a present, the Macintosh model. I said that once some man had been calling me a lot wanting to give me one, but that I’d never called him back or something, and then the kid looked up and said, “Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.” And he looked so young, like a college guy. And he told me that he would still send me one now. And then he gave me a lesson on drawing with it. It only comes in black and white now, but they’ll make it soon in color. And then Keith and Kenny used it. Keith had already used it once to make a T-shirt, but Kenny was using it for the first time, and I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who’d helped invent it. 

Sean’s bedroom had two mattresses on the floor and lots of Beatles pictures and the big Rupert Smith picture of Yoko on the wall. There was wrapping paper and presents all over the floor, and lots of robot toys on the shelves. After we left I was so blue because before I was Sean’s best grownup friend and now I think Keith is. They really hit it off. He invited Keith to his party for kids the next day and I don’t think I was invited and I’m hurt.”

- Andy Warhol, The Andy Warhol Diaries

Dorothy Herzka | Pop Art One

Dorothy Herzka

Pop Art One

New York City, USA: Publishing Institute of American Art, 1965

16 pp., 15 × 19 cm., spiral bound with loose leaves

Edition size unknown

One of the earliest documents of the New York Pop Art scene, this uniquely designed publication was edited by Dorothy Herzka. Herzka moved to Manhattan at the age of 24, to work at the Bianchini Gallery, on the Upper East Side. The following year, the gallery staged the exhibition The American Supermarket [see previous post] where she met her future husband.  

“We asked Roy [Lichtenstein] and Andy [Warhol] if they’d put an image on a shopping bag. I met Roy when he came in to sign the shopping bags,” she told Gagosian Quarterly in 2018. They married in 1968 and were together until his death in 1997. Dorothy died at her home in Southampton, New York on July 4, 2024, at the age of 84.

Pop Art One is comprised of twenty-seven loose leaf plates by Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann, and Warhol. It includes brief biographical notes and small photographic portraits of the artists.

The cover and pages of text are cut lengthwise in half, with plastic-comb binding on the outer edge of each half, folding together in the centre to enclose the portfolio of loose plates. The cover was held together with a sticker designed by Lichtenstein, though few of these survived, as the had to be torn for the book to be opened. 

Copies sell for between four and five hundred dollars. 

Al Hansen | Andy Warhol Box

Al Hansen

Andy Warhol Box (Drei Attentat Bilder)

Cologne, Germany: Hundertmark Editions, 1986

16.5 × 22.5 × 1.5 cm.

Edition of 30 signed, dated and numbered copies

On June 3rd, 1968, Gerard Malanga, Al Hansen and three others visited Andy Warhol’s Factory, to pick up a cheque. 

"The [elevator] door opened on madness," recalled Hansen. "Mario Amaya jumping around, blood all over the back of his shirt. He presents his bloody back to me, asking over his shoulder, 'Is it in me, is it in me?' Someone's legs sticking out from behind the far desk. Jed is kneeling, holding the someone's hand, tears in his eyes.” 

“Who’s the other one?” Hansen asked. It was Warhol, who had been shot with a 32-caliber pistol at close range, by Valerie Solanas, who Malanga and Hansen had missed by a matter of minutes. 

Earlier in the year, Solanas was attempting to have her book SCUM Manifesto published, and her script Up Your Ass produced. She presented the latter to Warhol to read, who feared it was entrapment: 

"In fact, when we'd gone to Cannes with Chelsea Girls the year before and I'd given that interview to Cahiers du Cinéma, it was Valerie Solanis [sic] I was referring to when I said, "People try to trap us sometimes. A girl called up and offered me a film script . . . and I thought the title was so wonderful, and I'm generally so friendly that I invited her to come over with it, but it was so dirty I think she must have been a lady cop. . . .”

Solanas returned to the Factory to retrieve the script, believing that Warhol was plotting with her publisher, Maurice Girodias, to prevent it from being published. Warhol had apparently misplaced it. 

Solanas was subsequently diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and sentenced to three years in prison.

This boxed work (the 110th edition by Armin Hundertmark) was published a few months before Warhol died in February of 1987. It features an original ballpoint pen drawings, handwritten text, three photocopies of watercolors and a watercolor title page, housed in a paperboard box. 

Dollar Bills

 

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol was born on this day in 1928. 

Moondog

Louis Thomas Hardin (mostly known as Moondog) was born on this day in 1916.