September 23, 2022 • 44 mins
In 1980s Manhattan, a young Cuban artist named Ana Mendieta made a name for herself as a rising star in the art world. Her turbulent marriage to the older and well-established sculptor Carl Andre raised eyebrows. One September night, Carl called 911 in a panic. His wife, he said, “went out the window.”
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Pushkin. This show contains adult language and occasional descriptions of violence.
Please keep that in mind when choosing when and where
to listen. It's May nineteen seventy three, Iowa City. There's
(00:33):
a damp chill in the air. We are on a
sort of shabby block in front of a brick apartment
building with a white door in need of a paint job,
and a storefront window with its blinds drawn shut. The
sidewalk just in front of the door is covered in blood,
and it looks like the blood might be seeping out
(00:55):
from under the door jam. It's a busy week day,
and as pedestrians pass the puddle of blood, they notice
it and casually step around it. Eventually, a man in
a green and black plaid jacket pauses and looks around
as if looking for an explanation. When none comes, he
(01:16):
walks away. Then a well dressed white woman uses her
umbrella to poke at the bloody puddle, but after a
moment or two of inspection, she also walks away. Finally,
an older gentleman emerges from a nearby store front and
silently cleans up the mess, and the evidence of whatever
happened is suddenly gone. And with it disappears any account
(01:40):
of whose blood was spilled and how. The whole scene
is being captured by two young women in their twenties, sisters,
who sit in an old car parked near by. One
of them holds a super eight camera, the kind you'd
make home movies with back them. The other snaps photos
(02:03):
with a thirty five millimeter camera. They are Anna and
Reclean Mendieta, Cuban refugees who landed in this unlikely place
as children in nineteen seventy three. Anna was a first
year MFA student at the University of Iowa. She was funny, loud, outrageous,
(02:26):
and had to take no prisoners vibe, and in the
way of sisters, she had roped Reclean into helping her
make a new piece, and like many works Anna made,
it would come to seem tragically prophetic in the wake
of her death. She basically staged what looked like the
remnants of, you know, physical violence with what looked like
(02:51):
blood in the doorway of a building, and I thought
it was extremely powerful for a very young artist to
be doing that, and to be doing it in a small,
largely white town of Iowa City was fascinating to me.
That's Connie Butler, one of the many curators who would
come to admire and study Ana Mendietta's work in the
(03:11):
decades that followed. The photos in film the Mendietta Sisters
took that day would ultimately become a work of art
called Moffett Building Piece. The fact that it still exists
only in these little thirty five millimeter slides, which you know,
you have to get very close to with a loop,
and it's a very intimate way of viewing these things.
(03:34):
You know, that implicates you as a viewer too, almost
as if you are yourself looking at a crime scene.
Anna's interest in blood wasn't only meant to shock. She
was keenly aware of violence and injustice. When she made
the Moffitt Building Piece, she was investigating her own community's
reaction to a brutal crime, a rape and murder that
(03:55):
had happened on campus a few months before. Here's how
she explained her inspiration. A young woman was killed, raped
and killed at Iowa in one of the dorms, and
it just really freaked me out. So I did sort
of rape performances type things at that time, using my
own body. I did something I believe in and that
(04:17):
I felt I had to do. That's not actually Anna
Mendietta's voice you're hearing. That was Tanya Brigera, another artist
from Cuba who you'll hear from more later. Anna Mendietta's
question was could you make art about something so awful?
(04:38):
And she used blood, not paint. Blood is the most
essential substance of life. Could it jolt people out of
their daily routines? Could blood make people pay attention? She
didn't know it yet, but the Moffett Building piece was
about to be her first major artwork, and in a
circular way, that's kind of terrifying. The question she asked
(05:01):
about how we react when we encounter the residue of violence.
This question would haunt all of us after she died.
I'm your host, Helen Molesworth and from Pushkin Industries, Something
Else and Sony Music Entertainment. This is Death of an Artist,
(05:24):
Episode one. The Haunting Boom. For my entire professional life,
I've been a member of something called the art world,
an exclusive network of artists, gallery dealers, curators, collectors, and
(05:48):
philanthropists for two decades. I was lucky enough to be
a museum curator, making me one of a small group
of cultural insiders who determine what art we see and
how we talk about it. In the museum world and
in art history, there are a lot of unspoken rules
about what you can say publicly and what is supposed
(06:08):
to stay private. It turns out I wasn't that good
at sticking to the script, and I guess I'm still
not good at it, because I'm going to tell you
Anna Mendietta's whole story, all the way to its shocking
and troubling end, and much to my surprise, I discovered
(06:30):
it's a story many of my colleagues in the art
world would prefer I didn't tell at first, blush. It
seemed like people didn't want me to talk about it
because of who else is part of that story. On
his husband, the famous sculptor Carl Andre. He is one
(06:50):
of the so called fathers of minimalism, a cultural hero
to many a revered artists with lots of connections, and
he was a suspect in Anna's death. Even though Carl
Andrea and Anna Mendietta were a highly visible art world couple,
even though something terrible happened between them the night she died.
(07:14):
You will not read about it on a museum wall label,
or in most art history textbooks reviews of their exhibitions
tend to take care of it. In a sentence or two,
you would not know that Mendietta's death divided the art
world in nineteen eighty five, and in many ways still does.
(07:37):
I'm not the first person to try and tell this story.
In fact, many of the voices you'll hear in this
show are from interviews conducted by investigative journalist Robert Katz.
He published a book in nineteen ninety that remains the
most comprehensive look into this art world tragedy. He spoke
with dozens of Anna and Carl's friends in noisy restaurants,
(08:00):
in parks, in busy offices, and you'll hear the voices
of some art world insiders on these tapes who have
since decided not to talk. Most folks don't want to
discuss what happened that night. They don't want to talk
about what the ramifications of that night were on the
art world. They don't want to contemplate what it means
(08:20):
when a community is torn apart by violence, and they
don't want to discuss whether or not justice has been served.
All these different folks not talking for all of their
different reasons means that a veil of silence started to
fall over this project. And I can't lie. The more
silence we encountered, the more sad and frustrated I became,
(08:45):
And the more silence we encountered, the more I wanted
to talk. Both Anna Mendietta and Carl Andre were incredible artists.
(09:07):
This could have been a story about a romance between
two fascinating people, but their story ends in a nine
one one call. Those who loved Anna Mendietta loved her fiercely.
Anna was extremely good company, super interesting, super funny, super lively.
(09:29):
She was always making plans, making schemes, getting you involved
in something. She decided that the only way to get
by in realme was to learn how to curse when
you drove, and she would like keep her window. She
told me, the left window down all the time so
she could put her arm out and flare the finger
and curse the people and they could hear her. Anna
(09:50):
was a contradictory. You know, she was a vegetarian, but
she loved to order stake tartar. She was funny, she
was engaging, She was very vital. She was a kind
of person you don't forget, like a lot of people
who are unforgettable. Even though everybody remembered her, not everyone
liked her. Her pensiant for pushing boundaries and not giving
(10:12):
the fuck what anyone else thought, both compelled and sometimes
irritated people. She was very magnetic. That's be Ruby Rich,
a prominent film scholar and a good friend of Anna's.
But she was also, as you may have heard, very
very argumentative, and so often people would end up in
(10:33):
a fight with her. But I found her very entertaining
even then. Anna's art school classmates remembered her early days
of art making is very experimental, sometimes a little gross,
sometimes kind of fun. Anna would sneak into the copy
center and xerox her breasts and her labia. She'd get
buckets of blood from the butcher and carry them into
(10:56):
the woods, where she'd strip down, hide parts of her
body under leaves, and then she'd have her friends blatter
blood around her and take photos. She got one of
her friends to trim his beard, and then she glued
the hair to her own face. In the nineteen seventies,
(11:20):
art was starting to get radical, and Anna was at
the forefront. The world was changing. The women's movement the
anti war movement were in full effect, and those movements
inspired artists to engage more directly with current events and
the public. Many artists wanted their art to be outside
(11:43):
the confines of a museum or a gallery, so they
staged performances in public spaces and started using non art
materials borrowed from everyday life. Back then, Manhattan was the
undisputed center of the art world. It was where the
action was. Like most young, ambitious artists of the time,
(12:04):
after finishing her degree in Iowa, Anna made her way
to New York. There she found a vibrant downtown scene
dominated by radical artists challenging the status quo of art.
One of the most important players at the time was
the already famous sculptor Carl Andre. This question is that art?
(12:27):
That's always the American and felistine question. How can you
call that art? And it's easy to call things arts,
very easy, But the question is is it good or
bad or useless? And that question is not generally As
notorious for his genre busting work, Andre looked exactly how
(12:48):
an artist was supposed to look. He was a stocky
white man who sported a bohemian beard and more uniform
of workers overalls. He was a fixture in the boozy
Soho arts scene. He had a reputation for his intellect,
his drinking, and his sharply worded opinions, and he helped
to invent a movement, so much so that he is
(13:10):
typically referred to as a founding father of minimalism. Andre
played a central role in defining the visual vocabulary of
minimalism and essentially redefine the very nature of sculpture itself.
Minimalism completely dominated the art scene of the late nineteen
sixties and seventies. Loosely speaking, it's a type of sculpture
(13:33):
known for its rigorous abstraction and simplicity. Think cubes, rectangles,
basic geometric forms, all of which were made using industrial
materials like steel, plywood, and fluorescent tubes. The vibe was cool, intellectual,
and severe. These minimalist guys, and they were predominantly guys,
(13:55):
didn't think art was about emotions or pretty pictures. For them,
art was a philosophical arena, a place to challenge outmoded
ideas and develop new ones. Today we might call this disruption.
Back then, it was called the avant garde. Andrea's major
(14:16):
contribution was to remove sculpture from its pedicial and to
examine its relation to the floor. There would be no
more monuments, no heroic reaching for the sky, no guys
on horseback. Instead, Andrea would make sculpture as close to
the floor as he could, get, so close that you
could even walk on them. Similar to Mendietta's use of blood,
(14:40):
Andrea was playing with a huge taboo in the art world.
He broke the fundamental rule of don't touch, and in
doing so, paved the way for a new kind of art,
and like Mendietta, he inspired strong reactions. Not everyone was
a fan of either him or his work. I'm not
(15:01):
sure where they are is in it? They just look
like tiles. I found him insufferable. He always dressed up
in his little worker's costume to show a badge of
being a working class artist, his overalls, which was faintly
ridiculous by then, as he lived in this luxury building
with a doorman. I had had little dealings with Andre,
(15:22):
except to be insulted by imperiodically. Yeah, the nicest personality
in the world. House. He's always extremely competitive with that
last voice is Carl LeWitt, wife of the equally famous
conceptual artist Saul LeWitt, who Carl was friends with for decades.
If you can't quite hear what she was saying, she
(15:43):
noted how competitive Carl could be with Saul. Controversy came
early to Carl Andre. He used everyday building materials such
as bricks and metal plates, which he typically just placed
on the floor. Because Andrea's work was not carved, bolted,
or welded, and was always just simply arranged or placed,
(16:06):
it inspired as much derision in the popular press as
it did admiration in the art world when London's most
important contemporary art museum bought a piece All Held Broke Loose.
In the nineteen seventies, the Tate acquired a piece by
Carl Andrea called Equivalent eight low lying piece on the
(16:30):
ground of fire bricks that are arranged in a grid.
That's art historian Julie Bryan Wilson, a professor who teaches
her UC Berkeley students about both Carl Andrea and an Amendetta.
It became a kind of press scandal how much the
sculpture was purchased for and how you know it was
one of these like my kid could do it kind
(16:52):
of arguments. When an interviewer asked Carl Andrea about it later,
he seemed amused by the controversy. Publicity is as good
as good publicity. It's not whether it's nice. I mean,
if they say it's nice and that's all, that's no good.
If they go on for hours and hours saying how
terrible it is, that's good. It's one thing to have
(17:12):
bravado about the bad press for your artwork. But this
wouldn't be Andrea's worst brush with the tabloids. But we'll
get to that later. For the moment, we're still squarely
in the nineteen seventies, a high flying time for avant
garde artists who made up a tight knit community that
revolved around a handful of bars, restaurants, and galleries. Most
(17:37):
artists were still relatively poor, taking day jobs to make
ends meet, making art in the after hours, and when
she first arrived in New York, Anna was one of
those artists. But a handful of artists became wildly successful
from the sale of their work, and Carl was one
of those artists. It was in this heady mixture of
(17:59):
ideas and art and Booze that Carl and Anna would
meet in a packed gallery in November nineteen seventy nine.
But this is no romcom. It's a tragedy, and it
involves two impressive, complex, flawed humans, two artistic powerhouses who
(18:20):
changed how we think about art. Anna and Carl's fateful
meeting would entangle their lives and reputations forever. They would
become symbolic of so much more that was larger than
just them as people. They came to represent insider versus outsider,
male versus female, white versus Latin X, cool and intellectual
(18:42):
versus bodily and emotional In a way, it's almost too overdetermined.
But none of this symbolism changes the fact that Anna
was trying to elbow her way to a seat at
the table that had already been set for Carl. When
Anna arrived in New York, she quickly fell in with
a small coterie of other women artists trying to make
(19:04):
their way in an incredibly white and male dominated art world.
She joined a feminist gallery called Ai R, and after
about a year and a half in Manhattan, Anna was
ready for her first solo exhibition. She came out of
the gate strong with a compelling body of work she
called Silhouetta, the Spanish word for silhouette. The show was
(19:27):
made up of a suite of photographs hung plainly on
the wall, no fancy frames, nothing to distract from the image.
The Silhouetta series had occupied Anna for years. Some of
the photographs show her lying naked on the earth, covered
with leaves, flowers, or grass. Others depict the outline of
a human body pressed into the ground. Still others show
(19:49):
a mild indentation, a shallow space where a body once lay.
The press release for the show described her project as
quote an ongoing dialog between the artist in nature. The
works were part performance art, part earth art. In order
(20:10):
to drama attendance on his friend and colleague, the artist
Nancy Spiro, organized a panel discussion and invited the famous
Carl Andre to speak. The title of the panel discussion
was I Kid You Not? How has the women's art
movement affected male art attitudes? Such was the state of
feminism in the New York art world circa nineteen seventy nine.
(20:34):
But the idea worked and the panel drew the crowd
they were seeking. And then during the talk, something strange
started to happen to honest photographs. Nancy Spiro told the
journalist Robert Katz about it, for pictures started popping off
the wall. What happened was I think that maybe the
(20:55):
heat of all people in there must have been some
warping or expand was very bizarre and sold during receiving rate,
they popped off the love. That was terrible. She was
very upset about them. This old tape from the nineteen
eighties is hard to hear, but Nancy is saying that
(21:16):
honest photographs fell off the wall in the middle of
the event. After the panel discussion wrapped up, the almost
always generous Carl took several people out to a Japanese
restaurant next door, and I think Carl then invited Anna.
He didn't even know who she was. This is very gracious.
(21:38):
Nancy and Anna stayed behind to make sure Anna's photos
were back on the wall, and when they finally joined
the dinner, Carl paid Anna a lot of attention. Perhaps
his left wing politics led him to be interested in
an exile from Cuba. Perhaps he could sense an affinity
between their art. Both were exploring the horizontal quality of
(21:59):
the floor, the ground, and the earth as a space
for sculpture. Perhaps it was just your typical heterosexual shenanigans,
as Anna was undeniably charismatic and attractive, and Carl had
the shine of art world, fame and stardom. Anna's friend
Natalia Delgado thought it was a case of opposites attracting.
(22:21):
He had a call Mark's type of look, this long
hair and then a big, full beard wearing overalls, and
he was so tall and kind of heavy, and Anna,
she looked very slight compared to him, to look like
a bear. Here's how Anna's friend, Ella Troiano, a Cuban
American filmmaker, described her. Anna was small, thin, very pretty,
(22:46):
very vivacious. She was dark, what somebody would have called
exotic looking, and she had that kind of look that
wasn't easily classifiable. And thus began a tangled, on again,
off again relationship between an older, already legendary and twice
divorced man and the young, up and coming artist. But
(23:09):
Natalia felt they made sense together. There was an intellectual
attraction because of the interest in art, and that was
a big part of their relationship. I think that she
admired him because of his accomplishments as an artist, so
I think that was part of the attraction for her,
and he also gave her advice, and I think he
(23:30):
did exposure to artists that were you know, they would
go to Tuscany and go to have lunch with a
soula wit and they would get together at a party
with Frank Stella. Frank Stella was another hugely successful contemporary
of Carl's. You know, it gave her an exposure to
people that were really Carl's friends and really stayed as
(23:51):
Carl's friends, but that she probably would not admit initially
on her own. As is so often the case for women,
Anna was frequently described as being ambitious in a way
that was more accusation than accolade. Even some of her friends,
like the conceptual artist Louise Camnetzer, made the subtle assumption
(24:12):
that she got together with Carl for his connections and
didn't forgive her for entering a marriage situation with somebody
that was, according to her, very problematic. And I saw
it as partially a career move, but she definitely was ambitious.
(24:32):
It wanted to make it that Carl might have been
equally attracted to her. Rising star energy did not seem
to enter the equation for anyone, whatever the nuance of
the attraction. They became an art world couple, taking their
place in a social circle filled with the big names
of the Soho art scene at the time. They socialized
(24:56):
with other couples whose names you might know from the
walls of Art Museum Saul and Carol LeWitt, Lawrence and
Alice Weener, Nancy Spiro and Leon golub By all accounts,
they were feisty, and as was the habit of the time,
the booze flowed freely at art world openings and dinners,
fueling the whole scene. Anna was known for mixing her
(25:18):
wine with water, while Carl like champagne and good wine,
and after copious amounts of drinking, things could get uncomfortable.
So on one level we had good discussions, but then
as they proceeded to get um drunker or things, it
was just a kind of strange neuonic between them that
(25:44):
you would witness. They were very loud, yeah yeah, yeah,
Carl would be very cutting, and then she would be
more or less no retaliating the girl's way out to
the point where I didn't like to be with dam
(26:08):
you know, which is something that I don't didn't feel
about either of them. Girl can be really quite quite
nice and wonderful, except when he drinks too much, he
becomes doctor Jacklin. He would be a difficult to be
a ring. Like I said, this isn't a rom com.
(26:33):
Darkness is creeping in. One of Anna's friends could feel
it coming. I didn't know what to do. How can
you tell someone someone's going to kill you? That story?
After the break, Anna would always take me out to
(27:03):
dinner for my birthday. That's Howard Dina Pindell an artist,
a co founder of ai R, and a former curator
at the Museum of Modern Art. In nineteen seventy nine,
she was in a terrible car accident that left her
with a head injury and memory issues, and it also
left her with a high degree of emotional sensitivity. What
(27:26):
I found was I was somewhat sensitive. I don't want
to say psychic, but I was sensitive from the injury.
We were at a restaurant which no longer exists, just
the three of us, no one else was there. They
both drank a lot near the end of the meal,
and it literally just flashed across my mind. Literally, he's
(27:46):
going to kill her with his hands, and I was stunned.
And I heard that or felt that thought or whatever.
I didn't know what to do. How can you tell
someone someone's going to kill you? And why trust a voice,
you know, or a thought? So I'm assuming that you
(28:08):
didn't tell Anna that. There's no way I would have
told her. I mean, you know you don't you know
you discount I mean, how can I prove it? Yeah?
So no, I just felt I couldn't say anything. I
kind of pushed it into the back of my mind.
(28:29):
Things have started to get a little woo woo. First
the photos fall off the wall, and then there's Anna's
friend Howardina carrying around this awful, terrible vision that Anna's
life will end in violence. Perhaps Howardina was picking up
on the energy between Anna and Carl. After all, the
record shows they had plenty of tension, and one of
(28:51):
their perennial problems was how they compared professionally. One of
Anna's closest friends, Natalia Delgado, remembers going to an exhibit
of one of the most famous art couples of all time,
Diego Rivera and Frieda Callo. I went to the show
with Anna and she showed me this painting. There's a
(29:12):
painting by Frieda Callo of Diego and herself, and Diego's big,
and Frieda's next to him, and she's quite small by comparison.
And he said to Anna, this is us, this is us.
We are Diegoon Frieda. The Calo painting from nineteen thirty
(29:33):
one is a classic. In it, Frieda paints Diego standing
ramrod straight, enormous as a redwood, his feet the scale
of hamhocks, planted solidly on the ground. His gaze, smug
and confident, engages the viewer directly, and in one hand
he holds a painter's palette and several brushes. It's a
(29:55):
consummate image of the great artist, the grand old mass Her. Frieda,
on the other hand, is birdlike. Her feet are so
tiny that she almost looks like a doll. Her right
hand gently touches Diego, while her left hand gathers her
shawl around her Torso, even though she is the artist
who painted this picture, she offers herself as wife, companion,
(30:20):
and accessory to his main event. What did Anna think
of that comparison? She thought he had a big ego,
that he was comparing himself to Dior, Riera. That's what
she said, what an ego? Do you think she felt
he was rivalrous or threatened? Yes, by her rise? Oh yes.
And I think that the whole description of he was
(30:42):
Diego and she was freed to Callo. In a way,
they looked very much, you know, he looked like Diego
is big and hefty and she was small and petite.
Was a way of kind of saying, look, I'm more
important than you. Diego was still more the more prominent artist.
And I do think that's how he how he Carl
wanted it to be. And I do think that was
(31:06):
an issue for them. And she would say and she'd say, well, Carl,
you know, my career is on the rise right now.
And I think that really really rubbed him the wrong way.
He found that very threatening. It was a prescient comparison.
In the nineteen eighties, Diego was the hero and Frieda
was still just a footnote in art history. Diego, like Carl,
(31:30):
was known for his Marxist politics and his history of
thumbing his nose at capitalism. Carl had been active in
the anti war movement and adopted the posture that the
artist was similar to a day laborer. Diego was the
muralist who painted the workers rather than the factory owners.
(31:50):
Both Frieda and Anna in their lifetimes were the lesser
than partners to their male genius companions. What neither Frieda
nor Anna could have known was how the tides would
change and how they would each become the bigger star
in their own right. But again that's more rushing ahead.
(32:13):
It's late summer nineteen eighty five. Carl and Anna had
gotten married in January. They'd been spending most of their
time in Europe. Then we're just now back in New
York getting ready to set a house together. Anna was
going to give up her small apartment in Little Italy
and move into Carl's place. She asked her friend Marcia
(32:34):
Pelle's to help her with the move. She told me,
and we were going to move her stuff. We're gonna
go out and have a drink and dinner. So you
were going to move her books on Sunday to Car's aparbum.
But then she called the album Thursday night. She was
very upset and she said, I can't talk to you now.
(32:55):
The plans had changed, but I'm going to be moving
things from Karl's to my Carl. Anna had changed her plans.
Instead of moving more of her stuff into Karl's apartment,
she wanted to move everything out of Carl's apartment. They
had some kind of fight who are the last by her?
(33:18):
And she decided that she was been not moving and
move with samside. We've arrived at the threshold of our
terrible story. Sunday, September eighth, nineteen eighty five, a mere
nine months after their wedding. There's a lot we don't
(33:39):
know about that evening. Here are a few things we
know for certain. We know that Anna never moved her
things as she had planned to. We know that the
unhappy couple spent the evening at Carl's place, an apartment
on the thirty fourth floor of a relatively new lug
(34:00):
Jury high rise in Greenwich Village. That night, like New
Yorkers everywhere, they ordered Chinese food and watched TV. Then,
sometime after five am, a passer by on the street
below heard a woman's scream, no, no, no. A moment later,
(34:22):
there was a sound like an explosion on the roof
of the deli below Carl's apartment. Anna had fallen from above.
Carl called nine five twenty nine am. We don't have
the tape of that call. After the verdict, the whole
(34:43):
trial record, including the call, was sealed, but a reporter
who heard it played at trial said Carl Andre's voice
was distressed that he wailed, and thus his explanation was
interrupted with cries and moans. You've asked voice actors to
read parts of the transcript of the nine one one call. Again,
(35:12):
my wife has committed suicide. Carl gives the address his
phone number and says they're on the thirty fourth floor.
The operator asks what happened exactly? Yeah, what happened was
we had a My wife is an artist and I'm
an artist, and we had a quarrel about the fact
(35:33):
that I was more exposed to the public than she
wasn't She went to the bedroom and I went after her,
and she went out of the window. So she jumped
out of the window. How long ago did this happen? Well,
I don't know, I don't know. I don't know, I
don't know it was I don't I don't know. They
talked for several more seconds. Did it happen recently? Did
(35:53):
it happen just now? Oh, it happened just now. I mean,
I can't I can't tell you about way the building
and yeah, I don't know it's it. I can, I can,
I can help. In September of nineteen eighty five, I
(36:22):
was a sophomore in college in Albany, New York. I
had already walked on top of one of carl Andre's sculptures.
They were installed in nearly every museum in the country.
I'd be lying if I didn't tell you how much
I love them. I was completely turned on by their
taboo breaking fuck you energy. The severity of his metal
(36:43):
plates lying on the floor in a simple checkerboard pattern
almost struck me as punk in my younger Brasher years.
I didn't learn about Anna Mendietta until years after her death,
when I was well into graduate school, and even then
I learned about her from a fellow student, not through
any of my professors. I was trained by art historians
(37:07):
who believe the prime directive was to separate the life
of the artist from their work. This meant no one
ever said that Carl Andre was married to Anna Mendietta,
much less that he was accused of murdering her. Top
that off with the fact that Anna Mendietta was a
Cuban immigrant showing at a feminist gallery, working with blood,
(37:29):
making work that summoned the idea of the Earth goddess.
Nothing could have been less cool in my philosophically inclined
education that privileged theory over feeling. But during the first
two decades of the twenty first century, the world changed
a lot and fast, and I think I did too.
(37:49):
You know, if I had a Sonny looked like Trebon
at this moment, and where we are right now is
a resurgence from where the civil rights movement left off.
President Trump is defending a temporary travel band for seven
Muslim majority countries as a monument of Thousands of women
are using two words on social media to identify themselves
(38:10):
as survivors of sexual harassment and assault. Today it's hashtag
me too. I found myself thinking about Anna because she
did go on to become a free to call a
like figure, more powerful after her death than before, larger
than life. Revered. Scores of artists, mostly women, studied her,
(38:35):
reenacted her performances, paid homage to her with their own work.
They make pilgrimages to the important sites of her life Havana,
Iowa City, Rome, Greenwich Village and over the years, I
came to love Anna Mendieta's art because it felt so urgent,
so relevant, because politics did start to feel personal and
(38:57):
identity does matter. But could I love Mendieta's work well
also still being a fan of Carl Andres sculptures? Or
did I have to choose sides? It felt like the
only way to answer that question was by asking another
what really happened the night Anna died? I wondered what
(39:21):
we might be able to learn if we returned to
her story. When we first started making this podcast, I
assumed folks would want to talk about what happened between
Anna and Carl Man. Was I wrong? I don't want
to like badger you. You know what I mean? Right right?
(39:44):
May I ask you what you think the harm would
be a lot of my calls went like that. I
obviously wish we saw eye to eye on this one.
Thank you very much. I appreciate the time. Okay, bye.
Silence was starting to feel like a main character in
this story. Perhaps some art world insiders just want to
(40:07):
protect their own professional relationships with Carl Andre or with
the art dealers he's tight with. But it's not just
those who are loyal to Carl who remain quiet. Many
of Anna's friends also no longer want to talk. Quite
a few folks turned us down, citing reasons ranging from
busy schedules to not wanting to revisit the pain, to
(40:28):
not wanting to discuss Carl and Anna's relationship. We also
tried to talk to the estate of Annamandietta, even though
it's well known that they don't participate in conversations that
include Carl Andre. They prefer the focus to be solely
on Annamandietta's artwork. The more I thought about all the
different reasons people have for not wanting to talk, the
(40:48):
more I felt that the silence wasn't only protecting Carl Andre.
There were so many other ideas at stake. I was
in a community at odds with itself, unresolved about gendered
power dynamics, unsure of the boundaries between private and public,
and ultimately divided on whether it wanted institutional stability or
(41:12):
cultural change. As frustrating as it was to get turned
away over and over, honestly, it kind of lit a
fire in me. The more silence we encountered, the more
I felt like there was something important to say about
that silence. I keep coming back to Anna Mendieta's work.
(41:32):
The Moffett Building piece was just one in a series
of pieces she made with blood where she invited people
to look at the blood, to look at the violence.
Some people say Anna was morbid, that maybe she had
a death wish, But that's not what I see when
I look at her work. The Moffatt Building piece, really
(41:53):
all of her work with blood, It's not about her,
It's about you. It's about us. Her work is asking
us to stop and pay attention. It's asking us to
bear witness, to look, to not walk by, to open
the door. And that's what we're going to do. Coming
(42:20):
up on death of an artist, the story of what
happened after Carl's nine one one call. How could Carl,
who represented the purity of the desire, how could he
have done such an act like that? He had two
different stories, and we confronted him on that. Carl's attorney
basically based his analysis of why she might have committed
(42:40):
suicide on Santia, on voodoo. There was a sense of
someone this tough, this strong, this brilliant as Anna could
be killed, then any of us could be killed. Well,
sometimes people would scream at you on the street. It
was quite a confrontational things and why it's still anger
so many artists today. I just started tweeting like there
(43:04):
will be blood. Death of an Artist is a co
production between Pushkin Industries, Something Else and Sony Music Entertainment.
(43:28):
Written and hosted by me Helen Mouldsworth. Executive producers are
Lizzie Jacobs, Tom kinig Blee, Talmulaud, Jacob Weissberg and Lucas Werner.
Produced by Maria Luisa Tucker, editing by Lizzie Jacobs. Our
managing producer is Jacob Smith. Associate producers are Poodrou and
Eloise Linton. Additional production helped by Tally Abacassas, Voice acting
(43:52):
by Nick Brain and David Glover. Anna Mendieta's quotes were
read by Tanya Burgera, engineered by Sam Bear, fact checking
by Andrea Lopez Crusado. Our theme song is by Pooge Rue.
(44:15):
If you love this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus
to listen early, add free and get exclusive bonus content.
Look for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or
at pushkin dot Fm. Find more great podcasts from Sony
Music Entertainment. At sonymusic dot com. Backslash podcasts,
Pushkin. This show contains adult language and occasional descriptions of violence.
Please keep that in mind when choosing when and where
to listen. It's May nineteen seventy three, Iowa City. There's
(00:33):
a damp chill in the air. We are on a
sort of shabby block in front of a brick apartment
building with a white door in need of a paint job,
and a storefront window with its blinds drawn shut. The
sidewalk just in front of the door is covered in blood,
and it looks like the blood might be seeping out
(00:55):
from under the door jam. It's a busy week day,
and as pedestrians pass the puddle of blood, they notice
it and casually step around it. Eventually, a man in
a green and black plaid jacket pauses and looks around
as if looking for an explanation. When none comes, he
(01:16):
walks away. Then a well dressed white woman uses her
umbrella to poke at the bloody puddle, but after a
moment or two of inspection, she also walks away. Finally,
an older gentleman emerges from a nearby store front and
silently cleans up the mess, and the evidence of whatever
happened is suddenly gone. And with it disappears any account
(01:40):
of whose blood was spilled and how. The whole scene
is being captured by two young women in their twenties, sisters,
who sit in an old car parked near by. One
of them holds a super eight camera, the kind you'd
make home movies with back them. The other snaps photos
(02:03):
with a thirty five millimeter camera. They are Anna and
Reclean Mendieta, Cuban refugees who landed in this unlikely place
as children in nineteen seventy three. Anna was a first
year MFA student at the University of Iowa. She was funny, loud, outrageous,
(02:26):
and had to take no prisoners vibe, and in the
way of sisters, she had roped Reclean into helping her
make a new piece, and like many works Anna made,
it would come to seem tragically prophetic in the wake
of her death. She basically staged what looked like the
remnants of, you know, physical violence with what looked like
(02:51):
blood in the doorway of a building, and I thought
it was extremely powerful for a very young artist to
be doing that, and to be doing it in a small,
largely white town of Iowa City was fascinating to me.
That's Connie Butler, one of the many curators who would
come to admire and study Ana Mendietta's work in the
(03:11):
decades that followed. The photos in film the Mendietta Sisters
took that day would ultimately become a work of art
called Moffett Building Piece. The fact that it still exists
only in these little thirty five millimeter slides, which you know,
you have to get very close to with a loop,
and it's a very intimate way of viewing these things.
(03:34):
You know, that implicates you as a viewer too, almost
as if you are yourself looking at a crime scene.
Anna's interest in blood wasn't only meant to shock. She
was keenly aware of violence and injustice. When she made
the Moffitt Building Piece, she was investigating her own community's
reaction to a brutal crime, a rape and murder that
(03:55):
had happened on campus a few months before. Here's how
she explained her inspiration. A young woman was killed, raped
and killed at Iowa in one of the dorms, and
it just really freaked me out. So I did sort
of rape performances type things at that time, using my
own body. I did something I believe in and that
(04:17):
I felt I had to do. That's not actually Anna
Mendietta's voice you're hearing. That was Tanya Brigera, another artist
from Cuba who you'll hear from more later. Anna Mendietta's
question was could you make art about something so awful?
(04:38):
And she used blood, not paint. Blood is the most
essential substance of life. Could it jolt people out of
their daily routines? Could blood make people pay attention? She
didn't know it yet, but the Moffett Building piece was
about to be her first major artwork, and in a
circular way, that's kind of terrifying. The question she asked
(05:01):
about how we react when we encounter the residue of violence.
This question would haunt all of us after she died.
I'm your host, Helen Molesworth and from Pushkin Industries, Something
Else and Sony Music Entertainment. This is Death of an Artist,
(05:24):
Episode one. The Haunting Boom. For my entire professional life,
I've been a member of something called the art world,
an exclusive network of artists, gallery dealers, curators, collectors, and
(05:48):
philanthropists for two decades. I was lucky enough to be
a museum curator, making me one of a small group
of cultural insiders who determine what art we see and
how we talk about it. In the museum world and
in art history, there are a lot of unspoken rules
about what you can say publicly and what is supposed
(06:08):
to stay private. It turns out I wasn't that good
at sticking to the script, and I guess I'm still
not good at it, because I'm going to tell you
Anna Mendietta's whole story, all the way to its shocking
and troubling end, and much to my surprise, I discovered
(06:30):
it's a story many of my colleagues in the art
world would prefer I didn't tell at first, blush. It
seemed like people didn't want me to talk about it
because of who else is part of that story. On
his husband, the famous sculptor Carl Andre. He is one
(06:50):
of the so called fathers of minimalism, a cultural hero
to many a revered artists with lots of connections, and
he was a suspect in Anna's death. Even though Carl
Andrea and Anna Mendietta were a highly visible art world couple,
even though something terrible happened between them the night she died.
(07:14):
You will not read about it on a museum wall label,
or in most art history textbooks reviews of their exhibitions
tend to take care of it. In a sentence or two,
you would not know that Mendietta's death divided the art
world in nineteen eighty five, and in many ways still does.
(07:37):
I'm not the first person to try and tell this story.
In fact, many of the voices you'll hear in this
show are from interviews conducted by investigative journalist Robert Katz.
He published a book in nineteen ninety that remains the
most comprehensive look into this art world tragedy. He spoke
with dozens of Anna and Carl's friends in noisy restaurants,
(08:00):
in parks, in busy offices, and you'll hear the voices
of some art world insiders on these tapes who have
since decided not to talk. Most folks don't want to
discuss what happened that night. They don't want to talk
about what the ramifications of that night were on the
art world. They don't want to contemplate what it means
(08:20):
when a community is torn apart by violence, and they
don't want to discuss whether or not justice has been served.
All these different folks not talking for all of their
different reasons means that a veil of silence started to
fall over this project. And I can't lie. The more
silence we encountered, the more sad and frustrated I became,
(08:45):
And the more silence we encountered, the more I wanted
to talk. Both Anna Mendietta and Carl Andre were incredible artists.
(09:07):
This could have been a story about a romance between
two fascinating people, but their story ends in a nine
one one call. Those who loved Anna Mendietta loved her fiercely.
Anna was extremely good company, super interesting, super funny, super lively.
(09:29):
She was always making plans, making schemes, getting you involved
in something. She decided that the only way to get
by in realme was to learn how to curse when
you drove, and she would like keep her window. She
told me, the left window down all the time so
she could put her arm out and flare the finger
and curse the people and they could hear her. Anna
(09:50):
was a contradictory. You know, she was a vegetarian, but
she loved to order stake tartar. She was funny, she
was engaging, She was very vital. She was a kind
of person you don't forget, like a lot of people
who are unforgettable. Even though everybody remembered her, not everyone
liked her. Her pensiant for pushing boundaries and not giving
(10:12):
the fuck what anyone else thought, both compelled and sometimes
irritated people. She was very magnetic. That's be Ruby Rich,
a prominent film scholar and a good friend of Anna's.
But she was also, as you may have heard, very
very argumentative, and so often people would end up in
(10:33):
a fight with her. But I found her very entertaining
even then. Anna's art school classmates remembered her early days
of art making is very experimental, sometimes a little gross,
sometimes kind of fun. Anna would sneak into the copy
center and xerox her breasts and her labia. She'd get
buckets of blood from the butcher and carry them into
(10:56):
the woods, where she'd strip down, hide parts of her
body under leaves, and then she'd have her friends blatter
blood around her and take photos. She got one of
her friends to trim his beard, and then she glued
the hair to her own face. In the nineteen seventies,
(11:20):
art was starting to get radical, and Anna was at
the forefront. The world was changing. The women's movement the
anti war movement were in full effect, and those movements
inspired artists to engage more directly with current events and
the public. Many artists wanted their art to be outside
(11:43):
the confines of a museum or a gallery, so they
staged performances in public spaces and started using non art
materials borrowed from everyday life. Back then, Manhattan was the
undisputed center of the art world. It was where the
action was. Like most young, ambitious artists of the time,
(12:04):
after finishing her degree in Iowa, Anna made her way
to New York. There she found a vibrant downtown scene
dominated by radical artists challenging the status quo of art.
One of the most important players at the time was
the already famous sculptor Carl Andre. This question is that art?
(12:27):
That's always the American and felistine question. How can you
call that art? And it's easy to call things arts,
very easy, But the question is is it good or
bad or useless? And that question is not generally As
notorious for his genre busting work, Andre looked exactly how
(12:48):
an artist was supposed to look. He was a stocky
white man who sported a bohemian beard and more uniform
of workers overalls. He was a fixture in the boozy
Soho arts scene. He had a reputation for his intellect,
his drinking, and his sharply worded opinions, and he helped
to invent a movement, so much so that he is
(13:10):
typically referred to as a founding father of minimalism. Andre
played a central role in defining the visual vocabulary of
minimalism and essentially redefine the very nature of sculpture itself.
Minimalism completely dominated the art scene of the late nineteen
sixties and seventies. Loosely speaking, it's a type of sculpture
(13:33):
known for its rigorous abstraction and simplicity. Think cubes, rectangles,
basic geometric forms, all of which were made using industrial
materials like steel, plywood, and fluorescent tubes. The vibe was cool, intellectual,
and severe. These minimalist guys, and they were predominantly guys,
(13:55):
didn't think art was about emotions or pretty pictures. For them,
art was a philosophical arena, a place to challenge outmoded
ideas and develop new ones. Today we might call this disruption.
Back then, it was called the avant garde. Andrea's major
(14:16):
contribution was to remove sculpture from its pedicial and to
examine its relation to the floor. There would be no
more monuments, no heroic reaching for the sky, no guys
on horseback. Instead, Andrea would make sculpture as close to
the floor as he could, get, so close that you
could even walk on them. Similar to Mendietta's use of blood,
(14:40):
Andrea was playing with a huge taboo in the art world.
He broke the fundamental rule of don't touch, and in
doing so, paved the way for a new kind of art,
and like Mendietta, he inspired strong reactions. Not everyone was
a fan of either him or his work. I'm not
(15:01):
sure where they are is in it? They just look
like tiles. I found him insufferable. He always dressed up
in his little worker's costume to show a badge of
being a working class artist, his overalls, which was faintly
ridiculous by then, as he lived in this luxury building
with a doorman. I had had little dealings with Andre,
(15:22):
except to be insulted by imperiodically. Yeah, the nicest personality
in the world. House. He's always extremely competitive with that
last voice is Carl LeWitt, wife of the equally famous
conceptual artist Saul LeWitt, who Carl was friends with for decades.
If you can't quite hear what she was saying, she
(15:43):
noted how competitive Carl could be with Saul. Controversy came
early to Carl Andre. He used everyday building materials such
as bricks and metal plates, which he typically just placed
on the floor. Because Andrea's work was not carved, bolted,
or welded, and was always just simply arranged or placed,
(16:06):
it inspired as much derision in the popular press as
it did admiration in the art world when London's most
important contemporary art museum bought a piece All Held Broke Loose.
In the nineteen seventies, the Tate acquired a piece by
Carl Andrea called Equivalent eight low lying piece on the
(16:30):
ground of fire bricks that are arranged in a grid.
That's art historian Julie Bryan Wilson, a professor who teaches
her UC Berkeley students about both Carl Andrea and an Amendetta.
It became a kind of press scandal how much the
sculpture was purchased for and how you know it was
one of these like my kid could do it kind
(16:52):
of arguments. When an interviewer asked Carl Andrea about it later,
he seemed amused by the controversy. Publicity is as good
as good publicity. It's not whether it's nice. I mean,
if they say it's nice and that's all, that's no good.
If they go on for hours and hours saying how
terrible it is, that's good. It's one thing to have
(17:12):
bravado about the bad press for your artwork. But this
wouldn't be Andrea's worst brush with the tabloids. But we'll
get to that later. For the moment, we're still squarely
in the nineteen seventies, a high flying time for avant
garde artists who made up a tight knit community that
revolved around a handful of bars, restaurants, and galleries. Most
(17:37):
artists were still relatively poor, taking day jobs to make
ends meet, making art in the after hours, and when
she first arrived in New York, Anna was one of
those artists. But a handful of artists became wildly successful
from the sale of their work, and Carl was one
of those artists. It was in this heady mixture of
(17:59):
ideas and art and Booze that Carl and Anna would
meet in a packed gallery in November nineteen seventy nine.
But this is no romcom. It's a tragedy, and it
involves two impressive, complex, flawed humans, two artistic powerhouses who
(18:20):
changed how we think about art. Anna and Carl's fateful
meeting would entangle their lives and reputations forever. They would
become symbolic of so much more that was larger than
just them as people. They came to represent insider versus outsider,
male versus female, white versus Latin X, cool and intellectual
(18:42):
versus bodily and emotional In a way, it's almost too overdetermined.
But none of this symbolism changes the fact that Anna
was trying to elbow her way to a seat at
the table that had already been set for Carl. When
Anna arrived in New York, she quickly fell in with
a small coterie of other women artists trying to make
(19:04):
their way in an incredibly white and male dominated art world.
She joined a feminist gallery called Ai R, and after
about a year and a half in Manhattan, Anna was
ready for her first solo exhibition. She came out of
the gate strong with a compelling body of work she
called Silhouetta, the Spanish word for silhouette. The show was
(19:27):
made up of a suite of photographs hung plainly on
the wall, no fancy frames, nothing to distract from the image.
The Silhouetta series had occupied Anna for years. Some of
the photographs show her lying naked on the earth, covered
with leaves, flowers, or grass. Others depict the outline of
a human body pressed into the ground. Still others show
(19:49):
a mild indentation, a shallow space where a body once lay.
The press release for the show described her project as
quote an ongoing dialog between the artist in nature. The
works were part performance art, part earth art. In order
(20:10):
to drama attendance on his friend and colleague, the artist
Nancy Spiro, organized a panel discussion and invited the famous
Carl Andre to speak. The title of the panel discussion
was I Kid You Not? How has the women's art
movement affected male art attitudes? Such was the state of
feminism in the New York art world circa nineteen seventy nine.
(20:34):
But the idea worked and the panel drew the crowd
they were seeking. And then during the talk, something strange
started to happen to honest photographs. Nancy Spiro told the
journalist Robert Katz about it, for pictures started popping off
the wall. What happened was I think that maybe the
(20:55):
heat of all people in there must have been some
warping or expand was very bizarre and sold during receiving rate,
they popped off the love. That was terrible. She was
very upset about them. This old tape from the nineteen
eighties is hard to hear, but Nancy is saying that
(21:16):
honest photographs fell off the wall in the middle of
the event. After the panel discussion wrapped up, the almost
always generous Carl took several people out to a Japanese
restaurant next door, and I think Carl then invited Anna.
He didn't even know who she was. This is very gracious.
(21:38):
Nancy and Anna stayed behind to make sure Anna's photos
were back on the wall, and when they finally joined
the dinner, Carl paid Anna a lot of attention. Perhaps
his left wing politics led him to be interested in
an exile from Cuba. Perhaps he could sense an affinity
between their art. Both were exploring the horizontal quality of
(21:59):
the floor, the ground, and the earth as a space
for sculpture. Perhaps it was just your typical heterosexual shenanigans,
as Anna was undeniably charismatic and attractive, and Carl had
the shine of art world, fame and stardom. Anna's friend
Natalia Delgado thought it was a case of opposites attracting.
(22:21):
He had a call Mark's type of look, this long
hair and then a big, full beard wearing overalls, and
he was so tall and kind of heavy, and Anna,
she looked very slight compared to him, to look like
a bear. Here's how Anna's friend, Ella Troiano, a Cuban
American filmmaker, described her. Anna was small, thin, very pretty,
(22:46):
very vivacious. She was dark, what somebody would have called
exotic looking, and she had that kind of look that
wasn't easily classifiable. And thus began a tangled, on again,
off again relationship between an older, already legendary and twice
divorced man and the young, up and coming artist. But
(23:09):
Natalia felt they made sense together. There was an intellectual
attraction because of the interest in art, and that was
a big part of their relationship. I think that she
admired him because of his accomplishments as an artist, so
I think that was part of the attraction for her,
and he also gave her advice, and I think he
(23:30):
did exposure to artists that were you know, they would
go to Tuscany and go to have lunch with a
soula wit and they would get together at a party
with Frank Stella. Frank Stella was another hugely successful contemporary
of Carl's. You know, it gave her an exposure to
people that were really Carl's friends and really stayed as
(23:51):
Carl's friends, but that she probably would not admit initially
on her own. As is so often the case for women,
Anna was frequently described as being ambitious in a way
that was more accusation than accolade. Even some of her friends,
like the conceptual artist Louise Camnetzer, made the subtle assumption
(24:12):
that she got together with Carl for his connections and
didn't forgive her for entering a marriage situation with somebody
that was, according to her, very problematic. And I saw
it as partially a career move, but she definitely was ambitious.
(24:32):
It wanted to make it that Carl might have been
equally attracted to her. Rising star energy did not seem
to enter the equation for anyone, whatever the nuance of
the attraction. They became an art world couple, taking their
place in a social circle filled with the big names
of the Soho art scene at the time. They socialized
(24:56):
with other couples whose names you might know from the
walls of Art Museum Saul and Carol LeWitt, Lawrence and
Alice Weener, Nancy Spiro and Leon golub By all accounts,
they were feisty, and as was the habit of the time,
the booze flowed freely at art world openings and dinners,
fueling the whole scene. Anna was known for mixing her
(25:18):
wine with water, while Carl like champagne and good wine,
and after copious amounts of drinking, things could get uncomfortable.
So on one level we had good discussions, but then
as they proceeded to get um drunker or things, it
was just a kind of strange neuonic between them that
(25:44):
you would witness. They were very loud, yeah yeah, yeah,
Carl would be very cutting, and then she would be
more or less no retaliating the girl's way out to
the point where I didn't like to be with dam
(26:08):
you know, which is something that I don't didn't feel
about either of them. Girl can be really quite quite
nice and wonderful, except when he drinks too much, he
becomes doctor Jacklin. He would be a difficult to be
a ring. Like I said, this isn't a rom com.
(26:33):
Darkness is creeping in. One of Anna's friends could feel
it coming. I didn't know what to do. How can
you tell someone someone's going to kill you? That story?
After the break, Anna would always take me out to
(27:03):
dinner for my birthday. That's Howard Dina Pindell an artist,
a co founder of ai R, and a former curator
at the Museum of Modern Art. In nineteen seventy nine,
she was in a terrible car accident that left her
with a head injury and memory issues, and it also
left her with a high degree of emotional sensitivity. What
(27:26):
I found was I was somewhat sensitive. I don't want
to say psychic, but I was sensitive from the injury.
We were at a restaurant which no longer exists, just
the three of us, no one else was there. They
both drank a lot near the end of the meal,
and it literally just flashed across my mind. Literally, he's
(27:46):
going to kill her with his hands, and I was stunned.
And I heard that or felt that thought or whatever.
I didn't know what to do. How can you tell
someone someone's going to kill you? And why trust a voice,
you know, or a thought? So I'm assuming that you
(28:08):
didn't tell Anna that. There's no way I would have
told her. I mean, you know you don't you know
you discount I mean, how can I prove it? Yeah?
So no, I just felt I couldn't say anything. I
kind of pushed it into the back of my mind.
(28:29):
Things have started to get a little woo woo. First
the photos fall off the wall, and then there's Anna's
friend Howardina carrying around this awful, terrible vision that Anna's
life will end in violence. Perhaps Howardina was picking up
on the energy between Anna and Carl. After all, the
record shows they had plenty of tension, and one of
(28:51):
their perennial problems was how they compared professionally. One of
Anna's closest friends, Natalia Delgado, remembers going to an exhibit
of one of the most famous art couples of all time,
Diego Rivera and Frieda Callo. I went to the show
with Anna and she showed me this painting. There's a
(29:12):
painting by Frieda Callo of Diego and herself, and Diego's big,
and Frieda's next to him, and she's quite small by comparison.
And he said to Anna, this is us, this is us.
We are Diegoon Frieda. The Calo painting from nineteen thirty
(29:33):
one is a classic. In it, Frieda paints Diego standing
ramrod straight, enormous as a redwood, his feet the scale
of hamhocks, planted solidly on the ground. His gaze, smug
and confident, engages the viewer directly, and in one hand
he holds a painter's palette and several brushes. It's a
(29:55):
consummate image of the great artist, the grand old mass Her. Frieda,
on the other hand, is birdlike. Her feet are so
tiny that she almost looks like a doll. Her right
hand gently touches Diego, while her left hand gathers her
shawl around her Torso, even though she is the artist
who painted this picture, she offers herself as wife, companion,
(30:20):
and accessory to his main event. What did Anna think
of that comparison? She thought he had a big ego,
that he was comparing himself to Dior, Riera. That's what
she said, what an ego? Do you think she felt
he was rivalrous or threatened? Yes, by her rise? Oh yes.
And I think that the whole description of he was
(30:42):
Diego and she was freed to Callo. In a way,
they looked very much, you know, he looked like Diego
is big and hefty and she was small and petite.
Was a way of kind of saying, look, I'm more
important than you. Diego was still more the more prominent artist.
And I do think that's how he how he Carl
wanted it to be. And I do think that was
(31:06):
an issue for them. And she would say and she'd say, well, Carl,
you know, my career is on the rise right now.
And I think that really really rubbed him the wrong way.
He found that very threatening. It was a prescient comparison.
In the nineteen eighties, Diego was the hero and Frieda
was still just a footnote in art history. Diego, like Carl,
(31:30):
was known for his Marxist politics and his history of
thumbing his nose at capitalism. Carl had been active in
the anti war movement and adopted the posture that the
artist was similar to a day laborer. Diego was the
muralist who painted the workers rather than the factory owners.
(31:50):
Both Frieda and Anna in their lifetimes were the lesser
than partners to their male genius companions. What neither Frieda
nor Anna could have known was how the tides would
change and how they would each become the bigger star
in their own right. But again that's more rushing ahead.
(32:13):
It's late summer nineteen eighty five. Carl and Anna had
gotten married in January. They'd been spending most of their
time in Europe. Then we're just now back in New
York getting ready to set a house together. Anna was
going to give up her small apartment in Little Italy
and move into Carl's place. She asked her friend Marcia
(32:34):
Pelle's to help her with the move. She told me,
and we were going to move her stuff. We're gonna
go out and have a drink and dinner. So you
were going to move her books on Sunday to Car's aparbum.
But then she called the album Thursday night. She was
very upset and she said, I can't talk to you now.
(32:55):
The plans had changed, but I'm going to be moving
things from Karl's to my Carl. Anna had changed her plans.
Instead of moving more of her stuff into Karl's apartment,
she wanted to move everything out of Carl's apartment. They
had some kind of fight who are the last by her?
(33:18):
And she decided that she was been not moving and
move with samside. We've arrived at the threshold of our
terrible story. Sunday, September eighth, nineteen eighty five, a mere
nine months after their wedding. There's a lot we don't
(33:39):
know about that evening. Here are a few things we
know for certain. We know that Anna never moved her
things as she had planned to. We know that the
unhappy couple spent the evening at Carl's place, an apartment
on the thirty fourth floor of a relatively new lug
(34:00):
Jury high rise in Greenwich Village. That night, like New
Yorkers everywhere, they ordered Chinese food and watched TV. Then,
sometime after five am, a passer by on the street
below heard a woman's scream, no, no, no. A moment later,
(34:22):
there was a sound like an explosion on the roof
of the deli below Carl's apartment. Anna had fallen from above.
Carl called nine five twenty nine am. We don't have
the tape of that call. After the verdict, the whole
(34:43):
trial record, including the call, was sealed, but a reporter
who heard it played at trial said Carl Andre's voice
was distressed that he wailed, and thus his explanation was
interrupted with cries and moans. You've asked voice actors to
read parts of the transcript of the nine one one call. Again,
(35:12):
my wife has committed suicide. Carl gives the address his
phone number and says they're on the thirty fourth floor.
The operator asks what happened exactly? Yeah, what happened was
we had a My wife is an artist and I'm
an artist, and we had a quarrel about the fact
(35:33):
that I was more exposed to the public than she
wasn't She went to the bedroom and I went after her,
and she went out of the window. So she jumped
out of the window. How long ago did this happen? Well,
I don't know, I don't know. I don't know, I
don't know it was I don't I don't know. They
talked for several more seconds. Did it happen recently? Did
(35:53):
it happen just now? Oh, it happened just now. I mean,
I can't I can't tell you about way the building
and yeah, I don't know it's it. I can, I can,
I can help. In September of nineteen eighty five, I
(36:22):
was a sophomore in college in Albany, New York. I
had already walked on top of one of carl Andre's sculptures.
They were installed in nearly every museum in the country.
I'd be lying if I didn't tell you how much
I love them. I was completely turned on by their
taboo breaking fuck you energy. The severity of his metal
(36:43):
plates lying on the floor in a simple checkerboard pattern
almost struck me as punk in my younger Brasher years.
I didn't learn about Anna Mendietta until years after her death,
when I was well into graduate school, and even then
I learned about her from a fellow student, not through
any of my professors. I was trained by art historians
(37:07):
who believe the prime directive was to separate the life
of the artist from their work. This meant no one
ever said that Carl Andre was married to Anna Mendietta,
much less that he was accused of murdering her. Top
that off with the fact that Anna Mendietta was a
Cuban immigrant showing at a feminist gallery, working with blood,
(37:29):
making work that summoned the idea of the Earth goddess.
Nothing could have been less cool in my philosophically inclined
education that privileged theory over feeling. But during the first
two decades of the twenty first century, the world changed
a lot and fast, and I think I did too.
(37:49):
You know, if I had a Sonny looked like Trebon
at this moment, and where we are right now is
a resurgence from where the civil rights movement left off.
President Trump is defending a temporary travel band for seven
Muslim majority countries as a monument of Thousands of women
are using two words on social media to identify themselves
(38:10):
as survivors of sexual harassment and assault. Today it's hashtag
me too. I found myself thinking about Anna because she
did go on to become a free to call a
like figure, more powerful after her death than before, larger
than life. Revered. Scores of artists, mostly women, studied her,
(38:35):
reenacted her performances, paid homage to her with their own work.
They make pilgrimages to the important sites of her life Havana,
Iowa City, Rome, Greenwich Village and over the years, I
came to love Anna Mendieta's art because it felt so urgent,
so relevant, because politics did start to feel personal and
(38:57):
identity does matter. But could I love Mendieta's work well
also still being a fan of Carl Andres sculptures? Or
did I have to choose sides? It felt like the
only way to answer that question was by asking another
what really happened the night Anna died? I wondered what
(39:21):
we might be able to learn if we returned to
her story. When we first started making this podcast, I
assumed folks would want to talk about what happened between
Anna and Carl Man. Was I wrong? I don't want
to like badger you. You know what I mean? Right right?
(39:44):
May I ask you what you think the harm would
be a lot of my calls went like that. I
obviously wish we saw eye to eye on this one.
Thank you very much. I appreciate the time. Okay, bye.
Silence was starting to feel like a main character in
this story. Perhaps some art world insiders just want to
(40:07):
protect their own professional relationships with Carl Andre or with
the art dealers he's tight with. But it's not just
those who are loyal to Carl who remain quiet. Many
of Anna's friends also no longer want to talk. Quite
a few folks turned us down, citing reasons ranging from
busy schedules to not wanting to revisit the pain, to
(40:28):
not wanting to discuss Carl and Anna's relationship. We also
tried to talk to the estate of Annamandietta, even though
it's well known that they don't participate in conversations that
include Carl Andre. They prefer the focus to be solely
on Annamandietta's artwork. The more I thought about all the
different reasons people have for not wanting to talk, the
(40:48):
more I felt that the silence wasn't only protecting Carl Andre.
There were so many other ideas at stake. I was
in a community at odds with itself, unresolved about gendered
power dynamics, unsure of the boundaries between private and public,
and ultimately divided on whether it wanted institutional stability or
(41:12):
cultural change. As frustrating as it was to get turned
away over and over, honestly, it kind of lit a
fire in me. The more silence we encountered, the more
I felt like there was something important to say about
that silence. I keep coming back to Anna Mendieta's work.
(41:32):
The Moffett Building piece was just one in a series
of pieces she made with blood where she invited people
to look at the blood, to look at the violence.
Some people say Anna was morbid, that maybe she had
a death wish, But that's not what I see when
I look at her work. The Moffatt Building piece, really
(41:53):
all of her work with blood, It's not about her,
It's about you. It's about us. Her work is asking
us to stop and pay attention. It's asking us to
bear witness, to look, to not walk by, to open
the door. And that's what we're going to do. Coming
(42:20):
up on death of an artist, the story of what
happened after Carl's nine one one call. How could Carl,
who represented the purity of the desire, how could he
have done such an act like that? He had two
different stories, and we confronted him on that. Carl's attorney
basically based his analysis of why she might have committed
(42:40):
suicide on Santia, on voodoo. There was a sense of
someone this tough, this strong, this brilliant as Anna could
be killed, then any of us could be killed. Well,
sometimes people would scream at you on the street. It
was quite a confrontational things and why it's still anger
so many artists today. I just started tweeting like there
(43:04):
will be blood. Death of an Artist is a co
production between Pushkin Industries, Something Else and Sony Music Entertainment.
(43:28):
Written and hosted by me Helen Mouldsworth. Executive producers are
Lizzie Jacobs, Tom kinig Blee, Talmulaud, Jacob Weissberg and Lucas Werner.
Produced by Maria Luisa Tucker, editing by Lizzie Jacobs. Our
managing producer is Jacob Smith. Associate producers are Poodrou and
Eloise Linton. Additional production helped by Tally Abacassas, Voice acting
(43:52):
by Nick Brain and David Glover. Anna Mendieta's quotes were
read by Tanya Burgera, engineered by Sam Bear, fact checking
by Andrea Lopez Crusado. Our theme song is by Pooge Rue.
(44:15):
If you love this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus
to listen early, add free and get exclusive bonus content.
Look for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or
at pushkin dot Fm. Find more great podcasts from Sony
Music Entertainment. At sonymusic dot com. Backslash podcasts,
Host
Helen Molesworth
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