Donald Trump and the Arts: Or, That One Time the Don Pissed Off Andy Warhol

Donald Trump and Andy Warhol, 1983. Photo by Mario Suriani.

I stumbled upon the above photograph during some recent internet ramblings, and laughed: the “Don”, a horse, and Andy Warhol – that’s funny. But upon further thought, and considering the current state of things, I was confused. Why was Donald Trump palling around with Warhol in the 80s? In the photograph, they both display an easy demeanor and the hint of a smile, despite the fact that they are separated by a race horse(?). What’s the story here? Were they friends? What does Trump think about art?

The image sparked my curiosity, and gave me pause for thought. As Cleveland recently undertook a major sprucing up for the RNC (a complete house-cleaning including a flurry of publicly funded artistic activities[1]), it is perhaps the perfect time to take measure of the Republican party’s position on the arts, and further, what, if any, arts policies would Mr. Trump advocate?

“Cleveland is a city of arts, culture and rock and roll,” reads the first sentence on the RNC website’s “About Cleveland” tab. A promising description, but then one has to scroll down through seven subheadings (Lake Erie, Golf, Parks & Outdoors, Music, Casinos & Racetracks, Sports, and Dining) before you reach “Arts & Culture”. The “Plan Your Trip” Section is a bit more promising, offering links to “Cleveland’s Public Art Scene” and several museums.  But beyond fun activities while you’re in town for the convention, the Republican Party’s official stance on arts funding is difficult to discern.  Taking a look at their official 2016 platform is no help – the issue seems to be off the national radar these days.

Trump’s own policies on the arts are similarly laconic, bordering on the non-existent.  Good luck even finding the word “art” on his own website, other than in the title of his most famous book, The Art of the Deal. Digging a bit deeper, I did find a profile for the candidate on the Americans for the Arts Action Fund website, as well as his answers to a list of arts-related questions posed by blogger and Washington Post writer Alyssa Rosenberg back in March.  She sent a list of thirteen questions to all the candidates, and surprisingly she only heard back from Trump (Bernie, who often referred to himself as the future “arts president” failed to respond).  Unfortunately, Trump did not answer all the questions, and he mostly deferred his answers to the actions of Congress or the States.  For a man known for being downright bellicose, Trump is unusually reticent when it comes to the arts. And since Trump has no political record, one is forced to go to his business and personal history to find examples of his attitudes about art.  And if these precedents are any indication of his future intentions, it doesn’t bode well. 

Writing for ARTnews in April of this year, M.H. Miller perhaps summed up Trump’s relationship to the arts perfectly: “Trump’s name—not to mention his physical presence—is an unfamiliar sight in the city’s major cultural institutions. Wealthy public figures often fall into cultural patronage if for nothing else than the tax break. But since the beginning of his career, Trump has been, at best, apathetic to the arts in New York, and elsewhere.”  But there are some famous anecdotes such as the time he mistook a Donald Judd sculpture at MOMA for a table(?), and carelessly tossed his coat and some binders onto it.  Or there was the time he told a reporter that the Renoir signature on a painting on his private jet was worth 10 million, despite the fact that all of the paintings in his personal collection are known to be reproductions, including another often referenced Renoir that once hung in Ivana’s office (the original 1874 painting La loge is in the Courtauld Gallery, London).  And one of the only mentions of an authentic work of art owned by Trump are some sixteenth-century Flemish tapestries in his Florida home, that have been badly damaged by Trump’s negligence and the Florida sun according to his butler.

But anecdote aside, let’s get back to Warhol – what was going on in that photograph? According to an excellent blog post on the Warhol Museum site, the two met at a birthday party for the famous attorney Ray Cohn in 1981, and apparently got along well enough for Trump to visit the Factory soon after.  Their friendship seemingly blossoming, Trump asked Warhol to paint a “portrait” of a new building he was about to build, to be called “Trump Tower”.  The plan was for Warhol to make a large painting of the building that would grace the entrance lobby of the magnificent structure.  After visiting the construction site, taking photos, and looking at architectural models, Warhol burned drawings based on the photos and models onto separate silkscreens.  As the author of this post explains, “the result was a beautiful series of multilayered paintings in black, silver, and gold; some with a sprinkling of Warhol’s glittering diamond dust.”

Andy Warhol, Trump Tower, both 1981, Warhol Museum.  Will Trump’s presidential campaign result in a new level of importance for these paintings?

The commission did not end well, however.  When Trump returned to the Factory, he was unhappy with the artist’s efforts, as Warhol relates in his diary:

“The Trumps came down. […] I showed them the paintings of the Trump Tower that I’d done. I don’t know why I did so many, I did eight. In black and grey and silver which I thought would be so chic for the lobby. But it was a mistake to do so many, I think it confused them. Mr. Trump was very upset that it wasn’t color-coordinated. They have Angelo Donghia [a famous interior designer] doing the decorating so they’re going to come down with swatches of material so I can do the paintings to match the pinks and oranges. I think Trump’s sort of cheap, though, I get that feeling.” via The Warhol: Blog.

Trump never returned, and he never paid for the paintings.  Perhaps they were too dark, too ominous for someone expecting them to match a pink and orange color scheme.  Warhol often expressed resentment towards the Trumps in his diaries after the incident.  Two of the paintings ended up in the collection of the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and the others are scattered in collections around the world.

In a striking bit of irony, to make room for Trump Tower of the corner of Fifth Avenue and E. 56^th Street, the Bonwit Teller Department Store was torn down – a fact that Warhol surprisingly does not mention in his diaries.  Warhol worked there for nearly twenty years, where he created many of the store’s massive window displays –his most famous was installed in April 1961, and included some of his very first experiments in what would become “Pop Art”.  In fact Bonwit Teller featured the work of many famous artists in their Fifth Avenue storefront windows including James Rosenquist, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Salvador Dali.

Andy Warhol’s Bonwit Teller display, 1961. Image via Art21.

As Trump’s crews began to dismantle the historic building, in a seemingly benevolent move, he promised to give the two 15 foot-tall decorative panels high on the building’s exterior of to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Excellent examples of the Art Deco style, the panels were original to the 1929 building, and showed stylized female figures.  He had also promised to save a piece of rare bronze grillwork at the building’s entrance, but sadly neither survived – as the NY Times reported on June 6, 1980: “Two stone bas-relief sculptures high on the façade of the Bonwit Teller Building under demolition on Fifth Avenue – pieces that had been sought with enthusiasm by the Metropolitan Museum of Art – were smashed by jackhammers yesterday on the orders of a real estate developer.” The unnamed ‘developer’ was Trump, who at the time was not yet a well-known figure, but would become no stranger to the kind of media frenzy that followed this controversial incident.

Perhaps having learned his lesson early from Sculpture-Gate, it does not seem that Trump has bulldozed anything of artistic importance since.  In fact, one of his most recent projects demonstrates that Trump can occasionally see the value in renovating a historic structure.  Slated to open in September of this year, Trump has transformed the Old Post Office on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C. into a 270-room luxury hotel. In a 2014 press release Trump boasted: “We will work to restore this magnificent building to even well beyond its original grandeur” – and indeed photographs on the Trump Hotels website show that some care was taken in restoring this landmark building.[2]  The hotel is already offering specials for the January 2017 Inauguration, and boasts one of the largest ballroom spaces in the city – this is the kind of timing that could not be coincidental (a sign outside the building reads: Coming 2016 / TRUMP, meaning the hotel, obviously).

Image via Buzzfeed.

Unfortunately, the previous occupants of the historic building were forced to vacate the premises – tenants that included the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities (PCAH), and other federal agencies related to the arts. But I’m sure that was just coincidental, right?

---

[1] Including the Public Square Redesign, ROCK BOX, #flockCLE, Inter|Urban Art & Culture Connector, among many other projects.

[2] However, an investigative article on Buzzfeed outlines many allegedly disturbing decisions concerning the renovations, and regarding the apparently shady purchase of the taxpayer-owned structure.

mitchell

Many years have elapsed since I last updated this blog. Begun while lonely in London, wandering the streets of Paddington with a heavy iPod IV in tow - I thought my head would explode.  The results of my musings lay entombed on this site, like a miniature time capsule.

Leaving London and my blog behind, I returned to Cleveland in the late summer of 2007. I spent my nights doling out Ballantines to the good people of Tremont, having secured a bartending gig at Prosperity Social Club.  It was there, on a muggy September evening just after my shift, that I met two fresh-faced boys sitting at the bar.  One of them, sporting a white blazer, ratty bicycle gloves, and thread-bare jeans, was particularly engaging.  We discussed topics as far ranging as the merits of Saussure's structuralist linguistics to the new Formula One regulations, when what I assumed to be his girlfriend marched up and announced, "I'm leaving." The pretty girl dramatically stormed out of the bar, slamming the screen door in her wake.  Red-faced, he hurriedly shook my hand and mumbled, "I'm Mitch, by the way." I watched, bemused, as he quickly collected his pool cue, and shot out the door.

I knew that night that I had met someone special - someone singularly exceptional. In the hazy, dingy, and ultimately superficial world of Cleveland bar culture, Mitchell shined - a man apart, a gentleman.  With a razor-sharp wit and erudite knowledge of, well, everything under the sun, Mitch was truly a polymath - a polymath in cut-off jean shorts. In the five years since I last updated this blog, I would come to count him as one of my closest friends and confidantes.  On Sunday, July 29th, 2012, he was killed.

I told myself I would not write on the subject for at least a month (several aborted obits and weepy elegies thankfully never saw the light of day), such a pause seemed necessary to allow the tremendous weight of the situation to dissipate, albeit slightly.  And now I sit, nearing the one-month anniversary of my friend's death, unwilling or perhaps unable to accept the kind of closure implicit in this task.

Bridget Callahan, one of Mitch's many acquaintances and a seasoned blogger, wrote an eloquent and frankly touching memorial shortly after his death - it is the kind of piece I wish I had written myself, the true measure of its worth.  She weaves through an impressively accurate list, "Mitch was this, Mitch was that," and he was, indeed, all she describes, but much, much more.  And now he is nothing.

Left in such a vacuum, I cling to Mitchell's words - lost in the reverie of what amounts to a technological archive of our friendship. Death in the age of information, what a curious phenomenon - texts, emails, facebook messages, and a trove of jpg's - fragile, and ultimately intangible remnants of a life lost.   So little hard copy - I scroll through years-old text messages, the very last, sent less than 24 hours before his untimely death, reading "i do feel a compelling urge to get outta here...and see you..."

At an exhibition on the life of Percy Bysshe Shelley at the New York Public Library in June, as I lingered over the meticulously preserved relics of his life I remember feeling a pang of jealousy - woe for our modern disconnectedness.  Here was laid a panoply of Shelley-related objects, from his baby rattle to a section of his skull, lovingly collected, palpable reminders of the now incorporeal.

I recall pausing at the very last letter sent by Shelley's friend, John Keats, to the poet before his death.  Rife with tuberculosis, he explained to Shelley: "I am pick'd up and sorted to a pip.  My Imagination is a Monastry and I am its Monk... I am in expectation of Prometheus every day. In the hope of soon seeing you I remain most sincerely yours..."  But Keats never saw Shelley again - the letter left hanging like an unanswered text.  Keats's death that spring inspired Shelley's masterpiece, Adonaïs: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats (1821), to my mind, one of the more beautiful expositions on the loss of a friend:

"...he is not dead, he doth not sleep,
He hath awaken'd from the dream of life;
'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings. We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay."
(Stanza 39, Lines 343-351)

Shelley recognized what I now know: that death is actually for the living.  Left with the absence, we wander about aimlessly, keeping with phantoms, looking to fill the void.

 

Each day since July 29th I have been tagging along with Shelley, rotting, striking out at invulnerable nothings, on a losing search for comfort. This situation is all the more vexing given my background.  One of my research interests is post-mortem photography, more generally the Victorian perception of death, and their materials of mourning.  I have spent the better part of my graduate career trying to uncover their lost rituals, examining mementoes of death such as hair jewelry (making jewelry from the hair of the deceased was extremely popular in America, well into the twentieth century).  I once organized a small exhibition of memorial hair jewelry for the Cincinnati Art Museum, and got the chance to handle hundreds of these small, poignant relics.  Holding a tiny ring in my palm containing plated brown hair from the early nineteenth century, I felt it was strangely charged with emotion, nigh hundreds of years after the hair was clipped - remains of what was?

A Ring Containing Keats's Hair, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford

Mitchell was killed by a drunk driver, struck down while standing at a street festival behind a barricade.  His death was extremely violent and traumatic, therefore, I was shocked to see the casket open at his memorial.  Wearing his trademark white blazer, sunglasses folded neatly on his lapel, his strange body laid awkwardly, hands like claws covered in heavy make-up.  But his hair, oh his hair - spilling down onto his shoulders, faintly moving in the draught of air from a nearby door, a cruel mirage of life. I felt an uncontrollable urge to discreetly snip a lock of his blonde tresses, to make a talisman for my grief - but I could not move.  Humbled in the presence of death, I searched his frozen face for a glimmer, a mere glint of what once was - and found, once again, nothing.  

In a collection of pensées, the French writer François Mauriac ponders the paradoxical nature of this confrontation:

"For a corpse is essentially an absence, an abandoned, rejected thing -- mortal remains at last. A feeling of trickery enters into the hideous dismay which we experience at the spectacle of death: our loved one is there and is no longer there. He has escaped from himself and in his flight he leaves this part of his being, the only visible and tangible part, which nevertheless no longer resembles him." -- Cain, Where Is Your Brother? (1962)

As I said farewell to the shell of my friend for the last time, I noticed a stain forming on the arm of his white sleeve - something was leaking out of that thing that was no longer Mitch.  A grim moment, but ultimately helpful - I took a deep breath, and stilled my heaving chest.
As I stood there over his casket, watching the circle of embalming fluid grow, I finally acceded that indeed, there was nothing there.  Nothing.

I slowly weaved my way out of the bland chain-store funeral parlor room, packed wall-to-wall with so many heartbroken people, and remembered what Mitchell said to me back in May. In what I try not to think of as a horrendous bit of foreshadowing, I was hit by a van myself crossing the street in Brooklyn. Miraculously I escaped injury, but was rather shaken. "I don't know if I could deal with losing Brittany," said Mitch in a text message dated May 30th.  Yes, you could, Mitch. Because somehow, we must.

flâneur

Emile Deroy, Charles Baudelaire, 1844, oil on canvas, Musee de Versailles


Anyone living in a big city, consisently using mass transit, or simply walking down a busy street understands the feeling of seeing someone for a flash - a spectacular moment of connection - only to see it vanish forever in a few steps. It's a peculiar phenomena of city-life - these ephemeral love affairs, ending as quickly as they begin...a thousand tiny little deaths every day.

In Paris in the 1850s, Charles Baudelaire, gentleman stroller of the city streets par excellence, experienced the very same feeling. His poem, À une passante (To A Passer-By), is one of a series of poems called the Tableaux Parisiens, in the 1861 edition of his Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil):



To A Passer-By

Amid the deafening traffic of the town,
Tall, slender, in deep mourning, with majesty,
A woman passed, raising, with dignity
In her poised hand, the flounces of her gown;

Graceful, noble, with a statue's form.
And I drank, trembling as a madman thrills,
From her eyes, ashen sky where brooded storm,
The softness that fascinates, the pleasure that kills.

A flash...then night! O lovely fugitive,
I am suddenly reborn in your swift glance;
Shall I never see you till eternity?

Somewhere, far off! too late! never, perchance!
Neither knows where the other goes or lives;
We might have loved, and you knew this might be!


In a previous entry I was musing on the Victorian fascination with physiognomy and it's correlation with the onset of city life in the age of Industrialization -- and there clearly is a connection here. The crowd can be menacing, filled with criminals and deviants, but it also allows for a new kind of romance....the fleeting, spectral, modern kind.

lament

Thomas Hardy, ca.1915

A friend told me recently about the Japanese custom of writing 'jisei' - or 'death poems' - a practice that stretches back to ancient times, when, at the moment of death, one's life is summed up in a few, usually simple lines. Here is a fairly recent example:

Like dew drops
on a lotus leaf
I vanish.
---------Senryu, died June 2, 1827

I was stunned today to learn that while on his death-bed, Thomas Hardy dictated a "death poem" to his wife. Hardy, perhaps best known as the author of a string of famous novels, such as Jude the Obscure, Tess of the d'Ubervilles, Far From the Madding Crowd and The Return of the Native, was an impressive poet as well...(and was often encouraged by his mentor and friend, George Meredith).

Falling suddenly ill with a terminal resperatory disease in December of 1927, Hardy was dead within a month. Yet in that month, faced with his demise, he took the time to compose a final verse. In what would be his final lines on this earth, the fading poet seems to realize that the secrets of death are better left unsaid.


HE RESOLVES TO SAY NO MORE (1928)

O my soul, keep the rest unknown!
It is too like a sound of moan
When the charnel-eyed* Pale Horse has nighed:
Yea, none shall gather what I hide!

Why load men's minds with more to bear
That bear already ails to spare?
From now always till my last day
What I discern I will not say.

Let Time roll backward if it will;
(Magicians who drive the midnight quill
With brains aglow can see it so,)
What I have learnt no man shall know.

And if my vision range beyond
The blinkered sight of souls in bond,
-- By truth made free
-- I'll let all be,
And show to no man what I see.




*charnel = a building or chamber in which bodies or bones are deposited

crush

I've been meaning to 'pen' a George Meredith appreciation post. He has been mentioned in passing in earlier posts, but I've never fully explained his 'story', or touched on why he is my favourite writer. [Disclaimer: What follows is entirely unacademic, filled with gossip, and is based on a romantic attachment to a dead person.]

George Meredith is all but forgotten today. A quick google search brings up a few flimsy biographies, and poor Meredith lacks the true gauge of popularity in our modern, digital world: a fake myspace page created in his honor. Not much of a buzz for the man Oscar Wilde once cited as his favourite novelist, saying: "Ah, Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos illuminated by flashes of lightning."

Perhaps you have never heard of Meredith the writer, or read one of his novels, but you may have actually gazed at his face without knowing it. Meredith, as a favour, modeled for the painter Henry Wallis, in his most famous painting, The Death of Chatterton, an event that changed the course of his life.

Henry Wallis, The Death of Chatterton, 1856
oil on canvas, Tate Gallery

Meredith sat several times for the artist, who, for accuracy's sake, wanted to use an actual poet for his depiction of Chatterton. Best known as the Romantic Movement's poster boy, Chatterton committed suicide by swallowing arsenic after repeated failures at getting his poetry published, rather than face starvation at the tender age of 17.



Henry Wallis, Study for The Death of Chatterton, 1856
pencil on paper, Tate Gallery

Despite the long hours, George Meredith was more than happy to sit for his friend; and even brought his wife, Mary Ellen Meredith, along. She was older, from an affluent, artistic family, and had plenty of time to chat with Wallis as her husband lay stretched out pretending to be dead. In an irony of epic Romantic proportions, Mary Ellen left Meredith for the dashing painter.

Her agonizing departure from his life was far from swift. It was in fact slow, complicated, tortuous even, as most break-ups are wont to be. In an age when divorce was nearly unheard of, the transference of her affections to the artist took time. This horrifying period of Meredith's life inspired what is perhaps his greatest work, a series of sonnets called Modern Love, written in 1862. If you're feeling especially energetic, you can read the poem in its entirety (all 50 sonnets!) here; but I think the first sonnet is enough to recognize Meredith's amazing ability at capturing the death of a love, using some of the most beautiful phrases I've ever read...


I.

By this he knew she wept with waking eyes:
That, at his hand's light quiver by her head,
The strange low sobs that shook their common bed
Were called into her with a sharp surprise,
And strangled mute, like little gaping snakes,
Dreadfully venomous to him. She lay
Stone-still, and the long darkness flowed away
With muffled pulses. Then, as midnight makes
Her giant heart of Memory and Tears
Drink the pale drug of silence, and so beat
Sleep's heavy measure, they from head to feet
Were moveless, looking through their dead black years,
By vain regret scrawled over the blank wall.
Like sculptured effigies they might be seen
Upon their marriage-tomb, the sword between;
Each wishing for the sword that severs all.

likeness

Cecelia Phillips, Brittany, 2006, oil on canvas

This entry is long overdue. But I think I've detected a pattern of late in my life - a trend if you will.

It is only natural as a human being to elicit some sort of interest in portraiture. But for the past year or so I've put what some may describe as an alarming amount of time and energy into 1) convincing others to create my portrait, and 2) to the study of the portraiture of others.

1) In an ongoing artistic project/performance, I am trying to have every artist that I know make some form of portrait/likeness of me - creating a catalogue of "selves" - or interpretations of myself mediated through others, so to speak. I've only just started, but already have acquired some top-notch portraits. The problem with such a project is that you're basically asking an artist to make and give you an original work - an obligation that is not always welcome.

2) In the past two weeks I have seen two amazing exhibitions of portraits by two of my favourite aritsts: Hans Holbein and David Hockney - two artists separated by the gulf of centuries, but interestingly both painting portraits mainly of english people:



Hans Holbein the Younger
A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling,
about 1526-8, oil on oak



David Hockney
Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy,
1970-71, acrylic on canvas

And while these are two very beautiful examples of their finished work, I find that the drawings included in both of these exhibitions are truly the show-stoppers. Hasty sketches on paper, capturing moments, glances: Hockney's drawings of Celia Birtwell and a young Gregory Evans are particularly riveting ---Likewise, Holbein's sweeping gestures in chalk capturing the faces of the English nobility in a single sitting are - quite literally - mesmerizing, judging by the amount of time I stood examining the delicate whiskers and finely wrought wrinkles around the eyes of Sir Thomas More.....


Hans Holbein the Younger
Sir Thomas More
1526-27, black and coloured chalks on paper



I suppose I should draw some sort of earth-shattering conclusion -- connecting all my thoughts on portraits together - but I'm afraid that I cannot. It all comes back to the face. This strange fixation I have with faces and identity. (Please go back to my earlier post on physiognomy for clarification). I guess I'm interested in how people can perform as active agents in their own visual construction - through the hands of others.

"Put your best face forward."

primitives

Another frequent activity of mine is spending time in the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery with the early Italian paintings. It's free, and a few of my all-time-favorite paintings are on view. I think the guards may think I am a bit odd. People generally walk through these rooms briskly, on their way to the famous Van Eycks nearby. I'm the only person that sits on the bench admiring these undervalued gems:


Sassetta, The Wolf of Gubbio, 1437-44
This is one panel of an altarpiece depicting scenes of the life of St. Francis; who you see here shaking hands with a wolf who had been terrorizing the inhabitants of Gubbio. To the right you can just make out the parts of a dismembered body he's maimed, and in the background the path in the woods is strewn with limbs. One of the best details is the women peeking through the spaces in the city wall. I realize it's impossible to see here. You really need to be in front of the painting to appreciate it.


Giovanni di Paolo
Saint John the Baptist Retiring to the Desert, probably about 1454
I think it's the way these Sienese artists treated landscapes that interests me most. That, and the palette. The soft pastels these artists used were probably not purely an aesthetic decision - I'm not sure that egg tempera allowed for much variety. And the flatness, the use of shape, and form - this is before the rules of perspective and the Renaissance ruined everything.

Other favorites, not in London, but on my make-believe wish-list:


Maybe by Sassetta, but more likely the Osservanza Master
Saint Anthony the Abbot Tempted by a Heap of Gold, ca. 1435
Lehman Collection, the Met, NYC


Master of the Osservanza
The Meeting of Saint Anthony and Saint Paul, ca. 1430/1435
National Gallery, Washington DC


Master of the Osservanza
Temptation of Saint Anthony Abbot, ca. 1435
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut


Giovanni di Paolo
Saint Clare Saving a Child from a Wolf, ca. 1455—60
Museum of Fine Arts Houston


Giovannii di Paolo
Ecce Agnus Dei (Behold the Lamb of God), 1455-60
Art Institute of Chicago


Sassetta
Ranieri saves the poor from a prison in Florence, ca. 1437-1444
The Louvre, Paris
(thank yous to john ennis for starting it all with this painting)

Alright I could post like twenty more...