Did Warhol Make Art for the 1964 Worlds Fair

▶ Criticism

Wednesday, July 9th, 2014

Wanted but Undesired: Andy Warhol at the 1964 World'southward Fair

13 Most Wanted Men: Andy Warhol and the 1964 World's Off-white at The Queens Museum
April 27 to September seven, 2014
New York City Building, Flushing Meadows Corona Park
Queens, 718 592 9700

Andy Warhol, Thirteen Most Wanted Men, 1964. Silkscreen on canvas, 20 x 20 feet. Installed at the New York State Pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair. Courtesy of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Queens Museum. — Andy Warhol, 13 Most Wanted Men, 1964. Silkscreen on canvas, 20 ten xx feet. Installation view at the New York Country Pavilion at the 1964 Earth'southward Fair. Copyright The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Courtesy of The Queens Museum.

The facts are more or less clear. Invited by the architect Philip Johnson to propose a public artwork for the New York State Pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair, Andy Warhol chose as his subject a set of mug shots from a New York police department bulletin of 13 About Wanted Men. Silkscreened on a twenty-by-20-foot grid, the resulting work was installed loftier above the fairgrounds on the oval Circarama building—an oversized rogues gallery canonized by its reverential placement. Once the pre-fair media buzz had reported the public's objections over what was essentially a series of massive wanted posters in a setting meant to celebrate civic accomplishment, Warhol, seemingly immune to the controversy he'd set in motion, wrote a letter to the Fair's organizers suggesting that the work be painted over in a color "of the architect's choice."

Installation view of Warhol's censored Thirteen Most Wanted Men at the New York State Pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair. Courtesy of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Queens Museum. — Installation view of Warhol's censored Xiii Most Wanted Men at the New York Country Pavilion at the 1964 Earth'southward Fair. Copyright The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Courtesy of The Queens Museum.

Afterwards the silkscreened panels were covered over with silver paint, the large monochromatic filigree remained for the entirety of the off-white, an enigmatic blank in a place that had been designated to glorify New York's vibrant cultural life. In an interview x years later, Johnson confessed that it was not Warhol's displeasure with the work that inspired its erasure (as Johnson stated publicly at the fourth dimension) only a bow to pressure level applied by Governor Nelson Rockefeller who was concerned that the work would alienate his large Italian-American constituency (the ethnicity of the majority of the mug shot subjects) during the initial stages of his campaign for the presidency.

In a small simply carefully organized evidence of paintings, films, and archival material, the Queens Museum, in association with the Warhol Museum, has reconstructed not only the details of the above incident, only the social and political context within which it took identify. Addressing the homoerotic subtext of the "nearly wanted men" subjects (Warhol'due south 1964 The thirteen Most Beautiful Boys screen tests are shown in an adjoining room), the exhibition too includes archival back up material that documents mainstream media's reportage on a changing cultural landscape. Revealing an atmosphere of repressive "cleansing" in New York City leading up to the opening of the Earth's Off-white, along with business about protests from ceremonious rights groups, news manufactures describe law raids on "cloak-and-dagger" film screenings of Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures (1963), as well equally a fearfulness of a planned "stall-in" (a group of protestors in cars that planned to collectively "run out of gas" to block the main highway to the fairgrounds) past the Congress for Racial Equality.

James P. Blair, A young girl drives her car on the World's Largest Map underneath the — James P. Blair, A young girl drives her car on the Globe's Largest Map underneath the "Tent of Tomorrow," 1965. Ektachrome photograph. Courtesy of National Geographic Magazine.

With pavilions sponsored by big business offering branded optimism accompanied by ethnic caricatures at the national pavilions, the fair merged a corporate futurism with Disney'southward "It'south a Small-scale Earth" motto, shrinking divergence and locality into a cartoonish internationalism that spoke to America's post-state of war ambitions of empire while dissent and "deviation" were beingness bottled up at home. While outwardly fun and carnivalesque, the 1964 Globe'due south Fair was a massive propagandistic effort and financial risk, with a cracking bargain at stake for organizer Robert Moses (whose 1939-40 fair at the same site had gone bankrupt) and Governor and presidential aspirant Nelson Rockefeller. Any controversy that might compromise the fair'southward success had to exist dealt with rapidly and decisively. With public pressure mounting, the 13 most wanted men were visible for a mere 48 hours before being covered over with silvery paint (and, briefly, a black shroud for expert measure).

There's a cute irony in the idea that a ready of (mug shot) portraits commissioned by the state, presumably with the public's welfare in mind, are appropriated past an artist to fulfill a public art committee which is and so censored past the state over concerns of alienating the public. While it'southward true that the subject of criminals is clearly out of pace with the laudatory atmosphere of a World's Fair, Warhol'southward coy literalism (he said he was asked to do a piece that had "something to do with New York") threatened to distract from the orgiastic mingling of a rising corporatism with national and regional pride then prominently featured at the Off-white. On the flooring of the Johnson-designed New York State Pavilion, adjacent to where the mug shots-turned-monochromes remained on display, was an enormous terrazzo road map of New York sponsored by Texaco, indicating all the locations of their gas stations across the state. In keeping with the Fair's agenda, which collapsed distinctions between business organization and everyday life, the "walkable" map realized a new scale of corporate paternalism within the public realm. With Warhol's (brief) elevation of the marginalized and feared now safely muted under the all-purpose glimmer of silver pigment, visitors below wandered across a map of the "new earth," a place where, the Fair seemed to promise, all their needs would be taken care of, as far into the future as they could imagine.