September 23, 2022 • 43 mins
Following Ana’s death, police take Carl in for questioning. He has scratches on his face. His story is inconsistent, yet he maintains his innocence. In this episode, we rewind and take a look back at Carl’s history and his relationship with Ana and try to understand what led to that night.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Pushkin that this show contains adult language and occasional descriptions
of violence. Please keep that in mind when choosing when
and where to listen. Previously on Death of an Artist.
(00:31):
She was very magnetic, but she was also very very argumentative,
and so often people would end up in a fight
with her. Yeah, Carl, Carl can be really quite nice
and wonderful, except when he drinks too much, he becomes
the doctor jacquet Worth emergency. Yeah. Yes, my wife has
(00:54):
committed suicide. We had a chorl about the fact that
I was more exposed to the public. That she went
to the bedroom and I went after her, and she
went out of the window. In twenty fourteen, I made
(01:18):
a pilgrimage to one of the holy sites of the
art world, Dia Beacon. DIA is a sprawling museum housed
in an old Nibisco factory in New York's Hudson River Valley.
It holds one of the most impressive collections of minimal
and conceptual art in the world. The work is always
perfectly installed, the vibe is one of purity, more than
(01:41):
anywhere else in the country. DIA stands for the belief
that art speaks for itself. That it doesn't need institutional interpretation.
There are no wall labels, no bells and whistles designed
to lure people in. It's a place for true believers,
for artists, and for hardcore art lovers like myself to
go and look. It's a place for art for art's sake.
(02:06):
DIA had just opened the first ever American retrospective of
one of the fathers of minimalism, Carl Andre. I was
in the midst of being courted for my dream job,
a chief curator position in my favorite American city, Los Angeles.
His fate would have it, it turned out that the
(02:27):
person doing the courting was also the person responsible for
the Carl Andre retrospective at DIA, so it seemed like
a good idea to see the show. I entered an
enormous open gallery. It was filled with both natural daylight
and Andre's minimal sculptures metal plates arranged in a checkerboard
(02:50):
pattern on the refurbished hardwood floors. It was breathtaking. There
were large rectangular pieces of cedars stacked in piles that
resembled staircases, a large table dotted with little sculptures made
of assembled bits and bobs, all with witty titles, terse
(03:11):
poems typed in caps on an old typewriter, or handwritten
in block mechanical lettering on graph paper, each letter perfectly
occupying one square. After I got my bearings, I asked
one of the security guards where the start of the
exhibition was. He said there wasn't one. You could just
(03:32):
start wherever. I was a little disappointed. I love a
story with a beginning, middle, and end. As I resigned
myself to just wandering around, my ego was too busy
fantasizing about that job in La to give room to
any of the questions in the back of my mind.
What happens when the art and ideas we once thought
(03:55):
were radical suddenly seemed stayed conventional, old fashioned? Even did
a man like Andrea deserve to be celebrated, worshiped, even
at a place like Dia? And what about Anamndieta. I
might have been avoiding these questions, but other people were
asking them, and they were angry. I'm your host, Helen
(04:23):
Molesworth and from Pushkin Industries, something Else and Sony Music Entertainment.
This is Death of an Artist, Episode two. What the
Wall label Doesn't tell You? After Carl called nine one one.
(04:50):
The police showed up, expecting to find the aftermath of
a suicide, but when they arrived things seemed off. The
brought Carl to the station, where two detectives began questioning him.
Detective Richard Nieves still remembers it. What he said to
nine to eleven was different than he told us in
(05:13):
the nine one one call. Carl had told the operator
that he and Anna had had a fight about who
was more famous, and then he said, quote, I went
after her and she went out the window. But now
he told us that he didn't know what happened to her.
(05:34):
She just disappeared with two detectives in front of him.
He said he'd stayed up watching TV after Anna went
to bed, and that when he went into the bedroom
to join her, he realized she was not in the apartment.
No mention of any argument. We confronted him on that
that he had two different stories, and he just said, well,
(05:55):
I said what I said, and that was it. It's
like he was trying maybe to tell us that, you know,
just take my word for it and shut up, and
that's it. That's all I'm going to say. Meanwhile, an
officer got a statement from the doorman of a nearby building.
(06:18):
He had been on his way to get some coffee
at the deli below Carl's high rise apartment. That's when
he heard a woman's voice pleading no, no, no, from
somewhere above. A few seconds later, the doorman heard what
sounded like an explosion. The deli night manager said he
heard it too, but it sounded more like a thud,
(06:39):
something landing on the roof of the deli. Anna had fallen.
And then there were the scratches. Nievis and his colleague,
a veteran detective named Ron Finelli, asked Carl about a
scratch on his nose. Carl said it had happened over
a week ago. He said that a straw gust of
(07:00):
wind when he was out in the terrorist said, shoved
the door into his face. But you know, a week
ago we would have been scabbed and tried. But that
the scratch, it looked pretty new to me. Carl, still
at the police station, agreed to return to his apartment
with the detectives. Detective Nieves noticed that the bedroom was
(07:22):
in disarray, an overturned chair, tossled bedclothes, and in the
kitchen there were several empty wine and champagne bottles, and
one other thing stood out for Detective Nieves, the window sill.
The weather was pretty high. I understand that she was
a short woman, and in order for her to jump,
(07:42):
she would have had to go upon a chair on
the edge of the bed but accidentally fall from that.
Now it's it's unless she was setting up there, which
I understand that she was afraid of heights, so us
that was not possible. As they spoke, Carl offered to
show the dectives a catalog of his work. I just
(08:03):
looked at it, and he was proud of it, and
you know, and he was saying that he was more
successful than she was. But then again, he was older
and he had many, you know, more years of experience.
The crime scene squad dusted for prints and took photographs.
Carl asked the cops if he could make some phone calls,
(08:25):
and then he phoned several friends to cancel dinner plants.
At no point did Carl attempt to call on his
family to break the news. By this time, the two
detectives were starting to feel like they had a murder
on their hands. I knew he was guilty. He was
just covering up. He was guilty of just kind of
(08:46):
picking her up and just you know, just throwing her
out the window. She landed in between the Delhi and
the Chinese takeout. It may have been the crime scene
unit that said if she fell, she would have fell here,
not over there. The police decided to take Carl back
to the station for more questioning. Word began to spread
that something terrible had happened to Anna and that Carl
(09:09):
was about to be arrested. A group of Carl's close friends,
many of whom were major players in the art world,
sprung into action. Toby We went to a police station
to ask what had happened, not just myself, but various
and sundry other friends. That's Lawrence Wiener, tall, bird, thin,
(09:32):
notoriously funny, a man who almost always had a cigarette
in either his mouth or his hand. He was a
much loved conceptual artist and one of Carl's oldest friends.
He helped Carl find a lawyer, any lawyer, and fast. Ultimately,
there would be three different lawyers who would come to
(09:53):
Carl's aid. First up was Jerry Rosam. Lawyers like want
to get their nose into the tent as soon as possible.
He would trying to get control of the case. I
didn't have that, you know feeling, is it thought that
that here was a really important artist in need of
(10:14):
some kind of help. At the police station, an assistant
DA had shown up, a young woman named Martha Bashford.
She made sure Carl understood his rights, requested photography of
the scratches not only on his face, but on his
upper left arm as well, and asked if he would
be willing to have their conversation videotaped. Just then, Carl's
(10:39):
lawyer showed up. My advice to the Carl was to
not go any further with any video statements. From a
legal point of view, I thought that he would wasn't
appropriate for him to do. Carl took his lawyer's advice
and declined to make a videotape statement. He also said
(11:01):
he didn't want to be photographed. When the assistant DA
heard Carl was refusing both a video statement and having
his picture taken, that's when Marsh I've said, f you
if he's under arrest now. He didn't have a choice,
and the detective found another scratch, this time on his back,
right below his neck. After pictures were taken, Carl was
(11:23):
arraigned and sent to Rikers. Meanwhile, his lawyers were already
working to bail him out. And I just made an
argument that he was a very famous artist, and they
had like a half million dosworth of art in New York,
and that all of this was substantial collateral. That basically
there was no way for him to go into hiding
(11:46):
because he was such a public person, even though you're
a judge had probably never heard of him, but you're
this is an esoteric art, world contemporary art. So I
was able to portray that to the judge. Of the
judge set Bay Twitter fifty thousand dollars, Carl's second lawyer,
Jerry Ordivar, was tasked with getting a quarter million dollars
(12:08):
of bail money. They called someone who liew of Andre
and would be sympathetic and who would have the funds
or the cloud to get the funds. The turn to
fifty thousand dollars and he called his bank and they
delivered a check to me. That person was Carl's equally
famous friend, the legendary painter Frank Stella. Stella had made
(12:34):
history with a game changing suite of black paintings made
by dipping your average hardware store brush into a can
of house paint and then meticulously covering the canvas with
stripes of black paint. Both Andrea and Stella had attended
the same prep school, though their friendship started in earnest
when they moved to New York in hopes of becoming artists.
(12:56):
Stella was rich and famous, and in this instance he
was also generous and loyal. He worked with some of
Carl's other friends to gather the bail money as fast
as possible, and so the lawyer headed to Rikers to
pick up Carl along with a two hundred and fifty
thousand dollar check and two passengers, artist Lawrence Weiner and
(13:19):
the renowned art dealer Paula Cooper. Paula was and still
is Carl's gallerist more than anyone else. Paula was the
person who made sure that Carl had a place to
show his work to the public and to sell it
to maintain his livelihood. She's legendary because she was the
first person to set up shop in Soho, and she's
(13:40):
always been beloved by artists because of her commitment to
new ideas. Carl waited in a cell away from the
general population, special treatment because of his art world fame.
They bailed him out, and Lawrence Weener recalled the somber
drive back from jail. There's four people sitting in a
(14:02):
car in absolute shock. The truth was just the most
horrendous situation. No, Carl is a very private man, and
the only thing he ever expressed to me was this
deep sense of loss that Anna wasn't there. According to Lawrence,
(14:23):
there was no discussion about what happened to Anna. I
don't intrude on my friends, and that's not the kind
of thing you can intrude on it. There are two questions.
You asked, you know what happened, and somebody says no,
and then they say that there's a deep sense of loss.
They really are totally broken up about it. And that's
(14:43):
the end of it. What else is there to say,
I confess this comment stuns me. This instinct to be silent,
to never talk about it, to sweep it under the rug,
to think there's nothing more to discuss. I find this
disturbed because silence would ultimately be Carl's legal strategy, and
(15:04):
it's set the template for the art world silence in
the decades that followed. To understand how Carl came to
have friends with two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in
(15:24):
their back pocket, lawyers at the ready, and then know
how to get their friends sprung from jail before you
had to spend too many hours at rikers. I'm going
to have to take you back to the beginning. I'll
tell you the story the way Carl told it in
an interview for Art Forum. I was born in Quincy, Massachusetts,
many many years ago. I always liked art class. Whenever
(15:47):
I said that to my parents, boy, I loved art class,
and my father was thinking, of course, let's clay. Carl's
father was an immigrant from Sweden who worked as a
marine raftsman at Quincy's famous shipyards. He read poetry at
the dinner table and forbade his wife to work. Carl
(16:10):
described his childhood playing in the salt marshes of northern
Massachusetts as quote almost Ferrell. He excelled in his public
elementary school and earned himself a full scholarship to one
of the East Coast's most prestigious private schools, Phillips and
Over Academy. Even though Frank Stella was one of cars
(16:30):
Phillips Academy classmates, they didn't meet until after Carl moved
to New York in nineteen fifty seven. Frank even let
Carl use his studio for a while. Around this time,
Carl was mostly writing poetry and made his living working
on freight trains. His four year stint working the railroad,
(16:50):
his friendship with Frank Stella, and his childhood and Quincy
would all become part of his legend. Here he is
reading one of his poems. He has Quincy Index one,
a list of words describing his birthplace. Abigail Academy, Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams, Artery,
(17:18):
Atlantic Bay, Bethlem Black's Blue, Boston, Brave, broad Book. Carl
wrote poetry throughout his career, but it would be the
sculpture that really got him noticed. Here he is in
a documentary about minimalism. He's the first of eleven artists,
(17:38):
all white, all men. He explains how he finds materials
to put together, usually sometime once a day. I'm walking
along Mercy Street, walking between the post office and the gallery.
We see Carl walking in a relatively derelict street in Soho,
(17:59):
which in the nineteen sixties was still a light manufacturing neighborhood,
not yet home to fancy renovated lofts and the art
galleries of the nineteen eighties or the glorified shopping mall
it's become today. While walking, Carl finds five or six
rectangular metal plates, which he assembles into a line on
the pavement. Now, this is absolutely like gold. Define these
(18:24):
because these are the materials of which I actually make
my sculptures. I really like the elements, the aluminum and copper,
magnesium and steel and lead and zinc. As we watch
him nudge the plates into alignment with his foot, we
(18:45):
see the new art and the new artist at work.
Nothing is fixed, no bolts, no welding. The pieces are
simply placed or stacked. Everything can be picked up and
moved around. Nothing is permanent. The act of assembling the
work and the act of walking on it or looking
at it are almost the same. All of the acts
(19:08):
ask you to think about the space you are in
and how that space exists, both before and after your
arrival and departure. This refusal to make anything like a monument,
or anything permanent, or anything that related to what things
looked like before was completely mind blowing for folks inside
(19:29):
the art world. I remember in sixty five having a
real epiphany. I warked into the galler and there were
piles of bricks on the floor, and I thought, oh, oh,
there's some construction going on. And I started to leave
the gallery and then I thought, wait a minute, what
if it's art? And I went and aft and it
(19:50):
went art, and I got so excited. It was like
a like a revolutionary moment. This is Peter Sheldall, who,
even at eighty years old, as the enthusiasm and sprightly
energy of a teenager. He's the renowned art critic for
The New Yorker, though back then he was mostly writing
for The Village Voice. It was literal in the world,
(20:16):
real stuff, you know. Form was condensed to tidiness, and
it was about me. It was about my presence barking
around these things. It was such a cleanliness and dignity
and insolence about it. I got a sense of a
(20:36):
revolution and that I was here at the start. It
was something that shifted, shifted to culture. You know. I
was like a pivot and nothing that's quite the same afterwards.
That's high praise coming from someone who saw almost every
exhibition there was to see in New York during the
nineteen sixties and seventies. But then Peter actually met Carl
(21:00):
when I'm matt him did not like him. You know
what he would say, Prima Donna and a bully. In
the before times, like before the Internet, even the New
York art world basically revolved around a handful of bars
and restaurants in Lower Manhattan. Bars such as the Cedar
(21:22):
Tavern and Max's Kansas City regularly get name checked in
the art history books. The basic template remained the same.
An art bar is a kind of divy bar where
you just show up and know that folks would be there.
In my day, it was the Shark Bar on Prince Street.
Once they're people, okay, mostly men, raged on about this
(21:46):
that or the other art theory and so and so's
latest exhibition or whatever exhibition review had been published in
last week's New York Times. Bars were where high stakes
ideas and strongly held feelings got mixed with politics and
booze to get sorted out in a major way. And
so at one of these art bars Peter and Carl met.
(22:12):
I started talking to him, and he said, you're like
Frank O'Hara, right, Frank O'Hara was a prominent poet as
well as a young curator at the Museum of Modern Art.
And then he started running down Frank O'Hara, and I
gave him the finger and laid my finger up an
indoctive nose, and you know, and I'm still marveling that
(22:34):
he didn't kill me. I mean he could have. He
was a strong man. I mean, it's right, and I was.
I was a skinny poet and we were drunk. I
was drunk. Did you continue to see andre in bars?
I see him, but but not not talked to him.
(22:58):
Disavoided him. You avoided it. Real Peter's version of the
nineteen sixties art world sounds like West Side Story, complete
with rival art gangs scoping out different parts of SOHO,
and much of the action took place at Max's Kansas City.
The division was between the Warhole people and the minimalist people.
(23:22):
The minimalist people were on the front along the bar,
and the Warhole people were in the back room. And
I could say that going in was like walking past
heavy metal to Strawberry Shortcake. And I went to the
Warhold people. I'm not sure how much the Insider Baseball
(23:43):
is translating here, so for those of you who aren't
up to speed on your art world posses. Shortcake refers
to Warhole's notoriously Swiss friends as they were called back
in the day, meaning gay people and anyone on the
fringe of white masculinity circa nineteen sixty You went to
(24:04):
the Shortcake, Yeah, well, I mean it was I felt
comfortable there. All the minimums are ashall Robert's mission, well, Donald, Judge, Jesus, Hey,
I'll accept shallow wit who was an angel in human form.
What a wonderful guy. Okay, back to the main story.
(24:27):
The other thing Carl was getting noticed for were his politics.
He was an important member of the art Workers Coalition.
Art historian Julia Brian Wilson describes it this way. Artworkers
Coalition was a brief lived artists rights organization that came
together in nineteen sixty nine, originally around issues of kind
(24:50):
of artists rights visa VI the museum and the institution.
Does the museum have the right to display an artist's
work in a way that the artist doesn't want or intent,
and very quickly demanded a whole slate of things that
included more representation around African American artists and Puerto Rican artists.
Carl was known as the resident Marxist of the group.
(25:15):
He was the one who seemed to have actually read
Carl Marx. I probably first read Carl's Artworkers Coalition Statement
and grad school, and I'm just as enthralled with it
now as I was then. It's so badass. The problem,
he says, is not museums, but this baggy thing called
(25:36):
the art world, a world he thinks should cease to exist.
No galleries standing in between the artist and the collector,
no critic in between the artists and the public, just
artists making work for themselves and anyone else who shows
up with interest and curiosity. Written in nineteen sixty nine,
(25:58):
it's still a kind of utopia I could get behind.
The Fact is Carl might not have always been well liked,
but damn if he didn't have good politics. There was
Carl the anti war activist and Carl the Artworker's Coalition activist,
(26:18):
and there was also the Carl who sent checks to
feminist causes. Between his groundbreaking work, his sharp tongue, and
that he showed at the trailblazing Paula Cooper Gallery. All
of this contributed to a reputation that was hard to
be denied. But Carl's official biography, the one that would
appear in every exhibition catalog about his work, started and
(26:43):
stopped with Quincy and the railroad job. And this is
pretty much the standard of how artists were discussed, birthplace, school,
other important men they knew, with little to no mention
of the wives, lovers, or children they spent their lives with.
(27:13):
Carl Andre spent six years of his life with Anna Mendieta.
Anna was born into a well to do family in Havana.
Both of her parents, Ignacio and Raquel, came from political
families dotted with generations of military men and politicians. Her father,
(27:34):
a lawyer, carried on this tradition and was an early
supporter of Fidel Castro. Their house in Havana bustled with
extended family and maids and cooks. They spent a lot
of time at a family beach house that has been
called a mansion. It was in Varadero Beach, a long
stretch of white sand that has been a resort destination
(27:56):
for decades. Her friend Talia Delgado, whose family socialized with
the Mendiettas in Varadero remembered it this way. I remember
going to the beach to Bararedo, where her family used
to also go. Our lives were pretty easy, filled with
a lot of caretakers, an extended family, and Anna's outspokenness.
(28:20):
Well apparently that started pretty early. She was very, very strong,
determined person, even as a child. I remember telling me
that whenever her parents had a fight, she would go
in and spreak it up and say, I don't want
to hear any more of this, because if you fight,
you're going to break up, and if you break up,
(28:40):
it's going to be terrible for me and for my siblings.
So you have to really keep it together and work
this out. This idyllic childhood would not last. This was
the scene of turmoil in the capital Havana as the
climax of revolution was reached. Anyone suspect of sympathy for
the Bautista regime came in for a rough time. In
(29:05):
nineteen fifty nine, when Anna was eleven years old, Fidel
Castro's Revolutionary Army forced President Bautista out of power. At first,
Anna's father was swept up in the new wave of
optimism and possibility that Castro represented, and he secured his
place in the new government. However, as Castro began to
(29:26):
crack down on Cubans with ties to American businesses, Ignazio
Mendieta came under fire. The collective promise that was made
was slowly being taken over by a very autocratic managerial policy.
This is Tanya Brigera, a Cuban artist, an activist. You've
(29:50):
heard her as our voice of Anna, but she's also
something of an expert about Cuba's autocratic policies. She's been
detained several times by the Cuban authorities because of her
art and her activism. At some point, Castro started deciding
thing without consulting anybody. He started, you know, having an
(30:12):
autonomy that you should not have the president. He was
very clear from the nineteen fifty nine that it was
with him or against him. While Anna's father maintained public
support for Castro, he refused to join the Communist Party
and ultimately became an elite counter revolutionary, working clandestinely to
(30:34):
challenge Castro's power. Anna and her sister rat Clean followed
in his footsteps, going so far as to hand out
anti Castro leaflets. This is what Anna told a reporter
in one of her very few filmed interviews Miami. Tanya translates,
(30:55):
my grandmama politicized me since I was a younger in Cardines.
She always told me all the war stories, all this
story of Cuba, everything about that side of the family.
By nineteen sixty, things were starting to get dangerous for
the Mendietta family. Ultimately, Ignazio would be arrested and sentenced
to twenty years in prison. But right before that happened,
(31:18):
the family made the difficult decision to send Anna and
her sister to the United States as part of a
secret Cold War program that sent Cuban children to America.
On his mother pregnant with her third child, her husband
and trouble stayed behind. Please, he's from Cuba. He's going
(31:41):
to stay here a WHI. It's a refugee camp. He's
a refugee. The audio you're hearing is from a film
made by the US government designed to explain to thousands
of Cuban children why their parents had sent them away.
(32:03):
When you are sending away to school for the first time,
or you go away to come, everything is strange. Every
body's strange. This is just an in between plays, or
you wait until they find you a foster home. Somewhere
in the United Anna and Raclean joined the fourteen thousand
(32:24):
other children flown to the US as part of Operation
Peter Pan. Where they landed was a far cry from
never never Land. The sisters boarded a plane in tropical,
cosmopolitan Havana. They eventually ended up in the flat, cold
corn fields of Iowa and were immediately sent to a
Catholic orphanage. They get off the plane in Iowa and
(32:47):
this priest comes on to tell them how they're very
lucky to be in the United States, and the United
States has a lot of development. For example, he said,
look at this, we have ballot pans. And Anna and
her sister looked at each other like, oh my god,
where we ended up. I mean, they knew all about
poppointments in Cuba, and they were just really shocked by
(33:10):
the lack of knowledge really of who these kids were
and where they were coming from. It's hard to imagine
these two sisters ripped from their beach house, their big
extended family, their social status, and suddenly placed in an
orphanage organized by age, which meant they were immediately separated.
(33:34):
The sisters were shuffled through a few different foster homes
and a boarding school, all of which made the temporary
separation from their parents feel more and more permanent. This displacement,
as emotional as it was physical, would have a profound effect.
Here's Anna's friend be Ruby Rich. She's lied to about
(33:56):
where she and her sister are being sent. They are
both lied to about being kept together. They're allied to
about going to a home like their own. They're allied
to about everything, and over and over, every time they moved,
they allied to again. So she not only has no
control as a child, but she is absolutely betrayed as
a child repeatedly. And I think that must have left
(34:19):
a really deep mark. Years later, Anna described the long
lasting effect of this displacement to a group of college students.
Here's Tanya Brigera voicing Anna again, since I left Cuba
when I was twelve because of the political situation there,
that mark has marked, you know, an aspect of my life,
(34:40):
so that I have failed, that I was torn away
from the womb, from the modern land. Miraculously, despite all
of this trauma, both sisters managed to graduate from high
school and by the time their mother and little brother
joined them nineteen sixty six, Anna had already discovered her calling.
(35:04):
She wanted to be an artist. I think also that
she's intoxicated by art making. I think it delivers her
to herself in a way that nothing else had. And
I think she's able there to put together all the
different parts of her personality and her life and make
something powerful out of that. And she'd been powerless, very
(35:29):
powerless for a very key part of her life, and
I think that part of her really needed filling up
with its opposite. What happened next was one of those
plot twists that can only be called fate. On a
transferred to the University of Iowa, where against all the odds,
(35:53):
she ended up enrolled in one of the most avant
garde art departments in the country, led by a guy
named Hans Brader. Brader came out of a super radical
group of performance artists, and he was inviting all of
the most cutting edge people from New York to come
in lecture at the university. Brader's radical program was like
a portal to another world, and Anna went right through it.
(36:17):
He identified her energy immediately and the two became lovers yep.
Anna was that girl, the super smart one, the wild one,
the one that slept with the teacher. But their thing
was no flash in the pam. They stayed together for years.
While she was in Iowa, she moved from painting to performance.
(36:38):
She said paintings were an illusion. They weren't real enough
for her. What was real to her was trying to
figure out the violence of the world around her, specifically
the rape and murder that had recently happened on campus.
In one performance, she invited viewers into her apartment where
she was stripped down, bent over a table, and covered
(37:00):
with animal blood. She was just as radical as the
artist from New York, and that's where she was headed.
In January of nineteen seventy eight, Anna moved to New
York City. Hans helped her get situated by introducing her
to artists, one of whom was the filmmaker Ella Troyano.
Here's how Ella remembered Anna when she first arrived in Manhattan.
(37:24):
I remember she had this notebook where she was so
worried about money that she was writing down in a
column every single thing that she spent money on. Every day.
Anna Wood brag that she furnished her entire apartment with
stuff she found on the street. Mattress and all her
early years in New York were a whirlwind. She worked
(37:47):
whatever job she could to make ends meet, and she
was slowly gaining traction in the art world, appearing in
group shows, making all the right connections, and eventually she
met Carl. Here's ele Troiano again. You've got somebody who
is in the city who totally believes an art, who
(38:07):
is very, very poor, is working her ass off to
get to situations where she can meet people that can
give her a show, and she does everything right. And
here is somebody all of a sudden, who, by the way,
looks a little bit like Hans Braider. Looking at pictures
(38:28):
of Carl and Hans, you can clearly see that Anna
had a type. They were both stocky and bearded, bearish
kind of men. When Carl came courting, some of Anna's
friends even called him Hans of the East. And you know,
Hans was a sweetheart, but Carl was less of a
sweetheart and more of an unlikely lefario. One reporter even
(38:52):
called him one of the art world's most notorious womanizers.
You know, this guy is now wooing her the way
he loves wooing with champagne, expensive dinners. And this is
somebody who's writing down I have ten cents that I
used to put on a stamp or whatever. That's enticing.
(39:12):
But it wasn't just the bubbly and the coin. Carl
had something much more important to offer an artist newly
arrived in the city. Carl had an entry into every
gallery and every museum. But I do think that she
really loved him, and she thought that she knew who
(39:33):
he was. While Carl and on his relationship went up
and down, on his career was on a steady climb.
She'd been getting good teaching gigs, and she was starting
to win awards and grants, and then she won the
prestigious pre Drome, a fellowship that came with an all
expensive paid apartment and studio in Italy. It was almost
(39:57):
too good to be true. She moved to Rome and
October nineteen eighty three and immediately took to it. She
loved her life in Rome. She told me that she
felt that finally she could put together New York and Cuba,
and it was called Roma. This is be Ruby rich again.
She had so much nerve. I mean, she would pretty
much do anything she wanted to do. She was not
(40:19):
a fearful person, except interestingly when it came to heights.
I want to pause here. This seems like a negligible detail,
but Honest's sphere of heights would become an important part
of the story. Everyone seemed to have a story about
how afraid she was, But the anecdote that would make
(40:40):
it to trial was from Marcia Pelle's, one of Anna's
friends in Rome. Marsha learned about Honna's sphere of heights
when they were hiking up to a friend's house at
the top of a hill. She described what happened on
a true crime show called City Confidential. And we start
to walk up and the ocean is like a five
(41:02):
Depp cut there, and this just a little thing of cactus.
There's no fencer or anything. And we start to walk
and she started to because she starts to completely freak out.
And I had no idea what was wrong. And she said,
I can't do this. I'm an agrophobiac. I'm petrified of heights.
I can't get near the edge. So the idea that
(41:23):
Anna had voluntarily climbed up onto the windowsill of an
apartment on the thirty fourth floor. The people who knew
Anna best were not buying it. Next time, on Death
of an Artist, I thought it is better to tell
him and say, look, I want a divorce. It never
(41:47):
occurred to me that he would kill her. I wrote
the article on the first anniversary of her death to
raise the profile of the case again and make it
too embarrassing for the district attorney to draw the case.
At one point it was what they believe was a
feminist cabal were about to get it. Sometimes people would
scream at you on the street. I used jilled at
(42:09):
him that he was a murderer. Death of an Artist
is a co production between Pushkin Industries, Something Else and
Sony Music Entertainment, Written and hosted by me Helen Mouldsworth.
Executive producers are Lizzie Jacobs, Tom kinnig Leetel Mulad, Jacob
Weissberg and Lucas Werner. Produced by Maria Luisa Tucker, editing
(42:32):
by Lizzie Jacobs. Our managing producer is Jacob Smith. Associate
producers are Pooge Rue and Eloise Linton. Additional production helped
by Tally Abacassas Annamandieto's quotes were read by Tanya Brigera,
engineered by Sam Baar, fact checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado.
Our theme song is by Pooge Rue. If you love
(43:02):
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 Sonymusic Entertainment at sonymusic dot com.
Backslash Podcasts
Pushkin that this show contains adult language and occasional descriptions
of violence. Please keep that in mind when choosing when
and where to listen. Previously on Death of an Artist.
(00:31):
She was very magnetic, but she was also very very argumentative,
and so often people would end up in a fight
with her. Yeah, Carl, Carl can be really quite nice
and wonderful, except when he drinks too much, he becomes
the doctor jacquet Worth emergency. Yeah. Yes, my wife has
(00:54):
committed suicide. We had a chorl about the fact that
I was more exposed to the public. That she went
to the bedroom and I went after her, and she
went out of the window. In twenty fourteen, I made
(01:18):
a pilgrimage to one of the holy sites of the
art world, Dia Beacon. DIA is a sprawling museum housed
in an old Nibisco factory in New York's Hudson River Valley.
It holds one of the most impressive collections of minimal
and conceptual art in the world. The work is always
perfectly installed, the vibe is one of purity, more than
(01:41):
anywhere else in the country. DIA stands for the belief
that art speaks for itself. That it doesn't need institutional interpretation.
There are no wall labels, no bells and whistles designed
to lure people in. It's a place for true believers,
for artists, and for hardcore art lovers like myself to
go and look. It's a place for art for art's sake.
(02:06):
DIA had just opened the first ever American retrospective of
one of the fathers of minimalism, Carl Andre. I was
in the midst of being courted for my dream job,
a chief curator position in my favorite American city, Los Angeles.
His fate would have it, it turned out that the
(02:27):
person doing the courting was also the person responsible for
the Carl Andre retrospective at DIA, so it seemed like
a good idea to see the show. I entered an
enormous open gallery. It was filled with both natural daylight
and Andre's minimal sculptures metal plates arranged in a checkerboard
(02:50):
pattern on the refurbished hardwood floors. It was breathtaking. There
were large rectangular pieces of cedars stacked in piles that
resembled staircases, a large table dotted with little sculptures made
of assembled bits and bobs, all with witty titles, terse
(03:11):
poems typed in caps on an old typewriter, or handwritten
in block mechanical lettering on graph paper, each letter perfectly
occupying one square. After I got my bearings, I asked
one of the security guards where the start of the
exhibition was. He said there wasn't one. You could just
(03:32):
start wherever. I was a little disappointed. I love a
story with a beginning, middle, and end. As I resigned
myself to just wandering around, my ego was too busy
fantasizing about that job in La to give room to
any of the questions in the back of my mind.
What happens when the art and ideas we once thought
(03:55):
were radical suddenly seemed stayed conventional, old fashioned? Even did
a man like Andrea deserve to be celebrated, worshiped, even
at a place like Dia? And what about Anamndieta. I
might have been avoiding these questions, but other people were
asking them, and they were angry. I'm your host, Helen
(04:23):
Molesworth and from Pushkin Industries, something Else and Sony Music Entertainment.
This is Death of an Artist, Episode two. What the
Wall label Doesn't tell You? After Carl called nine one one.
(04:50):
The police showed up, expecting to find the aftermath of
a suicide, but when they arrived things seemed off. The
brought Carl to the station, where two detectives began questioning him.
Detective Richard Nieves still remembers it. What he said to
nine to eleven was different than he told us in
(05:13):
the nine one one call. Carl had told the operator
that he and Anna had had a fight about who
was more famous, and then he said, quote, I went
after her and she went out the window. But now
he told us that he didn't know what happened to her.
(05:34):
She just disappeared with two detectives in front of him.
He said he'd stayed up watching TV after Anna went
to bed, and that when he went into the bedroom
to join her, he realized she was not in the apartment.
No mention of any argument. We confronted him on that
that he had two different stories, and he just said, well,
(05:55):
I said what I said, and that was it. It's
like he was trying maybe to tell us that, you know,
just take my word for it and shut up, and
that's it. That's all I'm going to say. Meanwhile, an
officer got a statement from the doorman of a nearby building.
(06:18):
He had been on his way to get some coffee
at the deli below Carl's high rise apartment. That's when
he heard a woman's voice pleading no, no, no, from
somewhere above. A few seconds later, the doorman heard what
sounded like an explosion. The deli night manager said he
heard it too, but it sounded more like a thud,
(06:39):
something landing on the roof of the deli. Anna had fallen.
And then there were the scratches. Nievis and his colleague,
a veteran detective named Ron Finelli, asked Carl about a
scratch on his nose. Carl said it had happened over
a week ago. He said that a straw gust of
(07:00):
wind when he was out in the terrorist said, shoved
the door into his face. But you know, a week
ago we would have been scabbed and tried. But that
the scratch, it looked pretty new to me. Carl, still
at the police station, agreed to return to his apartment
with the detectives. Detective Nieves noticed that the bedroom was
(07:22):
in disarray, an overturned chair, tossled bedclothes, and in the
kitchen there were several empty wine and champagne bottles, and
one other thing stood out for Detective Nieves, the window sill.
The weather was pretty high. I understand that she was
a short woman, and in order for her to jump,
(07:42):
she would have had to go upon a chair on
the edge of the bed but accidentally fall from that.
Now it's it's unless she was setting up there, which
I understand that she was afraid of heights, so us
that was not possible. As they spoke, Carl offered to
show the dectives a catalog of his work. I just
(08:03):
looked at it, and he was proud of it, and
you know, and he was saying that he was more
successful than she was. But then again, he was older
and he had many, you know, more years of experience.
The crime scene squad dusted for prints and took photographs.
Carl asked the cops if he could make some phone calls,
(08:25):
and then he phoned several friends to cancel dinner plants.
At no point did Carl attempt to call on his
family to break the news. By this time, the two
detectives were starting to feel like they had a murder
on their hands. I knew he was guilty. He was
just covering up. He was guilty of just kind of
(08:46):
picking her up and just you know, just throwing her
out the window. She landed in between the Delhi and
the Chinese takeout. It may have been the crime scene
unit that said if she fell, she would have fell here,
not over there. The police decided to take Carl back
to the station for more questioning. Word began to spread
that something terrible had happened to Anna and that Carl
(09:09):
was about to be arrested. A group of Carl's close friends,
many of whom were major players in the art world,
sprung into action. Toby We went to a police station
to ask what had happened, not just myself, but various
and sundry other friends. That's Lawrence Wiener, tall, bird, thin,
(09:32):
notoriously funny, a man who almost always had a cigarette
in either his mouth or his hand. He was a
much loved conceptual artist and one of Carl's oldest friends.
He helped Carl find a lawyer, any lawyer, and fast. Ultimately,
there would be three different lawyers who would come to
(09:53):
Carl's aid. First up was Jerry Rosam. Lawyers like want
to get their nose into the tent as soon as possible.
He would trying to get control of the case. I
didn't have that, you know feeling, is it thought that
that here was a really important artist in need of
(10:14):
some kind of help. At the police station, an assistant
DA had shown up, a young woman named Martha Bashford.
She made sure Carl understood his rights, requested photography of
the scratches not only on his face, but on his
upper left arm as well, and asked if he would
be willing to have their conversation videotaped. Just then, Carl's
(10:39):
lawyer showed up. My advice to the Carl was to
not go any further with any video statements. From a
legal point of view, I thought that he would wasn't
appropriate for him to do. Carl took his lawyer's advice
and declined to make a videotape statement. He also said
(11:01):
he didn't want to be photographed. When the assistant DA
heard Carl was refusing both a video statement and having
his picture taken, that's when Marsh I've said, f you
if he's under arrest now. He didn't have a choice,
and the detective found another scratch, this time on his back,
right below his neck. After pictures were taken, Carl was
(11:23):
arraigned and sent to Rikers. Meanwhile, his lawyers were already
working to bail him out. And I just made an
argument that he was a very famous artist, and they
had like a half million dosworth of art in New York,
and that all of this was substantial collateral. That basically
there was no way for him to go into hiding
(11:46):
because he was such a public person, even though you're
a judge had probably never heard of him, but you're
this is an esoteric art, world contemporary art. So I
was able to portray that to the judge. Of the
judge set Bay Twitter fifty thousand dollars, Carl's second lawyer,
Jerry Ordivar, was tasked with getting a quarter million dollars
(12:08):
of bail money. They called someone who liew of Andre
and would be sympathetic and who would have the funds
or the cloud to get the funds. The turn to
fifty thousand dollars and he called his bank and they
delivered a check to me. That person was Carl's equally
famous friend, the legendary painter Frank Stella. Stella had made
(12:34):
history with a game changing suite of black paintings made
by dipping your average hardware store brush into a can
of house paint and then meticulously covering the canvas with
stripes of black paint. Both Andrea and Stella had attended
the same prep school, though their friendship started in earnest
when they moved to New York in hopes of becoming artists.
(12:56):
Stella was rich and famous, and in this instance he
was also generous and loyal. He worked with some of
Carl's other friends to gather the bail money as fast
as possible, and so the lawyer headed to Rikers to
pick up Carl along with a two hundred and fifty
thousand dollar check and two passengers, artist Lawrence Weiner and
(13:19):
the renowned art dealer Paula Cooper. Paula was and still
is Carl's gallerist more than anyone else. Paula was the
person who made sure that Carl had a place to
show his work to the public and to sell it
to maintain his livelihood. She's legendary because she was the
first person to set up shop in Soho, and she's
(13:40):
always been beloved by artists because of her commitment to
new ideas. Carl waited in a cell away from the
general population, special treatment because of his art world fame.
They bailed him out, and Lawrence Weener recalled the somber
drive back from jail. There's four people sitting in a
(14:02):
car in absolute shock. The truth was just the most
horrendous situation. No, Carl is a very private man, and
the only thing he ever expressed to me was this
deep sense of loss that Anna wasn't there. According to Lawrence,
(14:23):
there was no discussion about what happened to Anna. I
don't intrude on my friends, and that's not the kind
of thing you can intrude on it. There are two questions.
You asked, you know what happened, and somebody says no,
and then they say that there's a deep sense of loss.
They really are totally broken up about it. And that's
(14:43):
the end of it. What else is there to say,
I confess this comment stuns me. This instinct to be silent,
to never talk about it, to sweep it under the rug,
to think there's nothing more to discuss. I find this
disturbed because silence would ultimately be Carl's legal strategy, and
(15:04):
it's set the template for the art world silence in
the decades that followed. To understand how Carl came to
have friends with two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in
(15:24):
their back pocket, lawyers at the ready, and then know
how to get their friends sprung from jail before you
had to spend too many hours at rikers. I'm going
to have to take you back to the beginning. I'll
tell you the story the way Carl told it in
an interview for Art Forum. I was born in Quincy, Massachusetts,
many many years ago. I always liked art class. Whenever
(15:47):
I said that to my parents, boy, I loved art class,
and my father was thinking, of course, let's clay. Carl's
father was an immigrant from Sweden who worked as a
marine raftsman at Quincy's famous shipyards. He read poetry at
the dinner table and forbade his wife to work. Carl
(16:10):
described his childhood playing in the salt marshes of northern
Massachusetts as quote almost Ferrell. He excelled in his public
elementary school and earned himself a full scholarship to one
of the East Coast's most prestigious private schools, Phillips and
Over Academy. Even though Frank Stella was one of cars
(16:30):
Phillips Academy classmates, they didn't meet until after Carl moved
to New York in nineteen fifty seven. Frank even let
Carl use his studio for a while. Around this time,
Carl was mostly writing poetry and made his living working
on freight trains. His four year stint working the railroad,
(16:50):
his friendship with Frank Stella, and his childhood and Quincy
would all become part of his legend. Here he is
reading one of his poems. He has Quincy Index one,
a list of words describing his birthplace. Abigail Academy, Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams, Adams, Artery,
(17:18):
Atlantic Bay, Bethlem Black's Blue, Boston, Brave, broad Book. Carl
wrote poetry throughout his career, but it would be the
sculpture that really got him noticed. Here he is in
a documentary about minimalism. He's the first of eleven artists,
(17:38):
all white, all men. He explains how he finds materials
to put together, usually sometime once a day. I'm walking
along Mercy Street, walking between the post office and the gallery.
We see Carl walking in a relatively derelict street in Soho,
(17:59):
which in the nineteen sixties was still a light manufacturing neighborhood,
not yet home to fancy renovated lofts and the art
galleries of the nineteen eighties or the glorified shopping mall
it's become today. While walking, Carl finds five or six
rectangular metal plates, which he assembles into a line on
the pavement. Now, this is absolutely like gold. Define these
(18:24):
because these are the materials of which I actually make
my sculptures. I really like the elements, the aluminum and copper,
magnesium and steel and lead and zinc. As we watch
him nudge the plates into alignment with his foot, we
(18:45):
see the new art and the new artist at work.
Nothing is fixed, no bolts, no welding. The pieces are
simply placed or stacked. Everything can be picked up and
moved around. Nothing is permanent. The act of assembling the
work and the act of walking on it or looking
at it are almost the same. All of the acts
(19:08):
ask you to think about the space you are in
and how that space exists, both before and after your
arrival and departure. This refusal to make anything like a monument,
or anything permanent, or anything that related to what things
looked like before was completely mind blowing for folks inside
(19:29):
the art world. I remember in sixty five having a
real epiphany. I warked into the galler and there were
piles of bricks on the floor, and I thought, oh, oh,
there's some construction going on. And I started to leave
the gallery and then I thought, wait a minute, what
if it's art? And I went and aft and it
(19:50):
went art, and I got so excited. It was like
a like a revolutionary moment. This is Peter Sheldall, who,
even at eighty years old, as the enthusiasm and sprightly
energy of a teenager. He's the renowned art critic for
The New Yorker, though back then he was mostly writing
for The Village Voice. It was literal in the world,
(20:16):
real stuff, you know. Form was condensed to tidiness, and
it was about me. It was about my presence barking
around these things. It was such a cleanliness and dignity
and insolence about it. I got a sense of a
(20:36):
revolution and that I was here at the start. It
was something that shifted, shifted to culture. You know. I
was like a pivot and nothing that's quite the same afterwards.
That's high praise coming from someone who saw almost every
exhibition there was to see in New York during the
nineteen sixties and seventies. But then Peter actually met Carl
(21:00):
when I'm matt him did not like him. You know
what he would say, Prima Donna and a bully. In
the before times, like before the Internet, even the New
York art world basically revolved around a handful of bars
and restaurants in Lower Manhattan. Bars such as the Cedar
(21:22):
Tavern and Max's Kansas City regularly get name checked in
the art history books. The basic template remained the same.
An art bar is a kind of divy bar where
you just show up and know that folks would be there.
In my day, it was the Shark Bar on Prince Street.
Once they're people, okay, mostly men, raged on about this
(21:46):
that or the other art theory and so and so's
latest exhibition or whatever exhibition review had been published in
last week's New York Times. Bars were where high stakes
ideas and strongly held feelings got mixed with politics and
booze to get sorted out in a major way. And
so at one of these art bars Peter and Carl met.
(22:12):
I started talking to him, and he said, you're like
Frank O'Hara, right, Frank O'Hara was a prominent poet as
well as a young curator at the Museum of Modern Art.
And then he started running down Frank O'Hara, and I
gave him the finger and laid my finger up an
indoctive nose, and you know, and I'm still marveling that
(22:34):
he didn't kill me. I mean he could have. He
was a strong man. I mean, it's right, and I was.
I was a skinny poet and we were drunk. I
was drunk. Did you continue to see andre in bars?
I see him, but but not not talked to him.
(22:58):
Disavoided him. You avoided it. Real Peter's version of the
nineteen sixties art world sounds like West Side Story, complete
with rival art gangs scoping out different parts of SOHO,
and much of the action took place at Max's Kansas City.
The division was between the Warhole people and the minimalist people.
(23:22):
The minimalist people were on the front along the bar,
and the Warhole people were in the back room. And
I could say that going in was like walking past
heavy metal to Strawberry Shortcake. And I went to the
Warhold people. I'm not sure how much the Insider Baseball
(23:43):
is translating here, so for those of you who aren't
up to speed on your art world posses. Shortcake refers
to Warhole's notoriously Swiss friends as they were called back
in the day, meaning gay people and anyone on the
fringe of white masculinity circa nineteen sixty You went to
(24:04):
the Shortcake, Yeah, well, I mean it was I felt
comfortable there. All the minimums are ashall Robert's mission, well, Donald, Judge, Jesus, Hey,
I'll accept shallow wit who was an angel in human form.
What a wonderful guy. Okay, back to the main story.
(24:27):
The other thing Carl was getting noticed for were his politics.
He was an important member of the art Workers Coalition.
Art historian Julia Brian Wilson describes it this way. Artworkers
Coalition was a brief lived artists rights organization that came
together in nineteen sixty nine, originally around issues of kind
(24:50):
of artists rights visa VI the museum and the institution.
Does the museum have the right to display an artist's
work in a way that the artist doesn't want or intent,
and very quickly demanded a whole slate of things that
included more representation around African American artists and Puerto Rican artists.
Carl was known as the resident Marxist of the group.
(25:15):
He was the one who seemed to have actually read
Carl Marx. I probably first read Carl's Artworkers Coalition Statement
and grad school, and I'm just as enthralled with it
now as I was then. It's so badass. The problem,
he says, is not museums, but this baggy thing called
(25:36):
the art world, a world he thinks should cease to exist.
No galleries standing in between the artist and the collector,
no critic in between the artists and the public, just
artists making work for themselves and anyone else who shows
up with interest and curiosity. Written in nineteen sixty nine,
(25:58):
it's still a kind of utopia I could get behind.
The Fact is Carl might not have always been well liked,
but damn if he didn't have good politics. There was
Carl the anti war activist and Carl the Artworker's Coalition activist,
(26:18):
and there was also the Carl who sent checks to
feminist causes. Between his groundbreaking work, his sharp tongue, and
that he showed at the trailblazing Paula Cooper Gallery. All
of this contributed to a reputation that was hard to
be denied. But Carl's official biography, the one that would
appear in every exhibition catalog about his work, started and
(26:43):
stopped with Quincy and the railroad job. And this is
pretty much the standard of how artists were discussed, birthplace, school,
other important men they knew, with little to no mention
of the wives, lovers, or children they spent their lives with.
(27:13):
Carl Andre spent six years of his life with Anna Mendieta.
Anna was born into a well to do family in Havana.
Both of her parents, Ignacio and Raquel, came from political
families dotted with generations of military men and politicians. Her father,
(27:34):
a lawyer, carried on this tradition and was an early
supporter of Fidel Castro. Their house in Havana bustled with
extended family and maids and cooks. They spent a lot
of time at a family beach house that has been
called a mansion. It was in Varadero Beach, a long
stretch of white sand that has been a resort destination
(27:56):
for decades. Her friend Talia Delgado, whose family socialized with
the Mendiettas in Varadero remembered it this way. I remember
going to the beach to Bararedo, where her family used
to also go. Our lives were pretty easy, filled with
a lot of caretakers, an extended family, and Anna's outspokenness.
(28:20):
Well apparently that started pretty early. She was very, very strong,
determined person, even as a child. I remember telling me
that whenever her parents had a fight, she would go
in and spreak it up and say, I don't want
to hear any more of this, because if you fight,
you're going to break up, and if you break up,
(28:40):
it's going to be terrible for me and for my siblings.
So you have to really keep it together and work
this out. This idyllic childhood would not last. This was
the scene of turmoil in the capital Havana as the
climax of revolution was reached. Anyone suspect of sympathy for
the Bautista regime came in for a rough time. In
(29:05):
nineteen fifty nine, when Anna was eleven years old, Fidel
Castro's Revolutionary Army forced President Bautista out of power. At first,
Anna's father was swept up in the new wave of
optimism and possibility that Castro represented, and he secured his
place in the new government. However, as Castro began to
(29:26):
crack down on Cubans with ties to American businesses, Ignazio
Mendieta came under fire. The collective promise that was made
was slowly being taken over by a very autocratic managerial policy.
This is Tanya Brigera, a Cuban artist, an activist. You've
(29:50):
heard her as our voice of Anna, but she's also
something of an expert about Cuba's autocratic policies. She's been
detained several times by the Cuban authorities because of her
art and her activism. At some point, Castro started deciding
thing without consulting anybody. He started, you know, having an
(30:12):
autonomy that you should not have the president. He was
very clear from the nineteen fifty nine that it was
with him or against him. While Anna's father maintained public
support for Castro, he refused to join the Communist Party
and ultimately became an elite counter revolutionary, working clandestinely to
(30:34):
challenge Castro's power. Anna and her sister rat Clean followed
in his footsteps, going so far as to hand out
anti Castro leaflets. This is what Anna told a reporter
in one of her very few filmed interviews Miami. Tanya translates,
(30:55):
my grandmama politicized me since I was a younger in Cardines.
She always told me all the war stories, all this
story of Cuba, everything about that side of the family.
By nineteen sixty, things were starting to get dangerous for
the Mendietta family. Ultimately, Ignazio would be arrested and sentenced
to twenty years in prison. But right before that happened,
(31:18):
the family made the difficult decision to send Anna and
her sister to the United States as part of a
secret Cold War program that sent Cuban children to America.
On his mother pregnant with her third child, her husband
and trouble stayed behind. Please, he's from Cuba. He's going
(31:41):
to stay here a WHI. It's a refugee camp. He's
a refugee. The audio you're hearing is from a film
made by the US government designed to explain to thousands
of Cuban children why their parents had sent them away.
(32:03):
When you are sending away to school for the first time,
or you go away to come, everything is strange. Every
body's strange. This is just an in between plays, or
you wait until they find you a foster home. Somewhere
in the United Anna and Raclean joined the fourteen thousand
(32:24):
other children flown to the US as part of Operation
Peter Pan. Where they landed was a far cry from
never never Land. The sisters boarded a plane in tropical,
cosmopolitan Havana. They eventually ended up in the flat, cold
corn fields of Iowa and were immediately sent to a
Catholic orphanage. They get off the plane in Iowa and
(32:47):
this priest comes on to tell them how they're very
lucky to be in the United States, and the United
States has a lot of development. For example, he said,
look at this, we have ballot pans. And Anna and
her sister looked at each other like, oh my god,
where we ended up. I mean, they knew all about
poppointments in Cuba, and they were just really shocked by
(33:10):
the lack of knowledge really of who these kids were
and where they were coming from. It's hard to imagine
these two sisters ripped from their beach house, their big
extended family, their social status, and suddenly placed in an
orphanage organized by age, which meant they were immediately separated.
(33:34):
The sisters were shuffled through a few different foster homes
and a boarding school, all of which made the temporary
separation from their parents feel more and more permanent. This displacement,
as emotional as it was physical, would have a profound effect.
Here's Anna's friend be Ruby Rich. She's lied to about
(33:56):
where she and her sister are being sent. They are
both lied to about being kept together. They're allied to
about going to a home like their own. They're allied
to about everything, and over and over, every time they moved,
they allied to again. So she not only has no
control as a child, but she is absolutely betrayed as
a child repeatedly. And I think that must have left
(34:19):
a really deep mark. Years later, Anna described the long
lasting effect of this displacement to a group of college students.
Here's Tanya Brigera voicing Anna again, since I left Cuba
when I was twelve because of the political situation there,
that mark has marked, you know, an aspect of my life,
(34:40):
so that I have failed, that I was torn away
from the womb, from the modern land. Miraculously, despite all
of this trauma, both sisters managed to graduate from high
school and by the time their mother and little brother
joined them nineteen sixty six, Anna had already discovered her calling.
(35:04):
She wanted to be an artist. I think also that
she's intoxicated by art making. I think it delivers her
to herself in a way that nothing else had. And
I think she's able there to put together all the
different parts of her personality and her life and make
something powerful out of that. And she'd been powerless, very
(35:29):
powerless for a very key part of her life, and
I think that part of her really needed filling up
with its opposite. What happened next was one of those
plot twists that can only be called fate. On a
transferred to the University of Iowa, where against all the odds,
(35:53):
she ended up enrolled in one of the most avant
garde art departments in the country, led by a guy
named Hans Brader. Brader came out of a super radical
group of performance artists, and he was inviting all of
the most cutting edge people from New York to come
in lecture at the university. Brader's radical program was like
a portal to another world, and Anna went right through it.
(36:17):
He identified her energy immediately and the two became lovers yep.
Anna was that girl, the super smart one, the wild one,
the one that slept with the teacher. But their thing
was no flash in the pam. They stayed together for years.
While she was in Iowa, she moved from painting to performance.
(36:38):
She said paintings were an illusion. They weren't real enough
for her. What was real to her was trying to
figure out the violence of the world around her, specifically
the rape and murder that had recently happened on campus.
In one performance, she invited viewers into her apartment where
she was stripped down, bent over a table, and covered
(37:00):
with animal blood. She was just as radical as the
artist from New York, and that's where she was headed.
In January of nineteen seventy eight, Anna moved to New
York City. Hans helped her get situated by introducing her
to artists, one of whom was the filmmaker Ella Troyano.
Here's how Ella remembered Anna when she first arrived in Manhattan.
(37:24):
I remember she had this notebook where she was so
worried about money that she was writing down in a
column every single thing that she spent money on. Every day.
Anna Wood brag that she furnished her entire apartment with
stuff she found on the street. Mattress and all her
early years in New York were a whirlwind. She worked
(37:47):
whatever job she could to make ends meet, and she
was slowly gaining traction in the art world, appearing in
group shows, making all the right connections, and eventually she
met Carl. Here's ele Troiano again. You've got somebody who
is in the city who totally believes an art, who
(38:07):
is very, very poor, is working her ass off to
get to situations where she can meet people that can
give her a show, and she does everything right. And
here is somebody all of a sudden, who, by the way,
looks a little bit like Hans Braider. Looking at pictures
(38:28):
of Carl and Hans, you can clearly see that Anna
had a type. They were both stocky and bearded, bearish
kind of men. When Carl came courting, some of Anna's
friends even called him Hans of the East. And you know,
Hans was a sweetheart, but Carl was less of a
sweetheart and more of an unlikely lefario. One reporter even
(38:52):
called him one of the art world's most notorious womanizers.
You know, this guy is now wooing her the way
he loves wooing with champagne, expensive dinners. And this is
somebody who's writing down I have ten cents that I
used to put on a stamp or whatever. That's enticing.
(39:12):
But it wasn't just the bubbly and the coin. Carl
had something much more important to offer an artist newly
arrived in the city. Carl had an entry into every
gallery and every museum. But I do think that she
really loved him, and she thought that she knew who
(39:33):
he was. While Carl and on his relationship went up
and down, on his career was on a steady climb.
She'd been getting good teaching gigs, and she was starting
to win awards and grants, and then she won the
prestigious pre Drome, a fellowship that came with an all
expensive paid apartment and studio in Italy. It was almost
(39:57):
too good to be true. She moved to Rome and
October nineteen eighty three and immediately took to it. She
loved her life in Rome. She told me that she
felt that finally she could put together New York and Cuba,
and it was called Roma. This is be Ruby rich again.
She had so much nerve. I mean, she would pretty
much do anything she wanted to do. She was not
(40:19):
a fearful person, except interestingly when it came to heights.
I want to pause here. This seems like a negligible detail,
but Honest's sphere of heights would become an important part
of the story. Everyone seemed to have a story about
how afraid she was, But the anecdote that would make
(40:40):
it to trial was from Marcia Pelle's, one of Anna's
friends in Rome. Marsha learned about Honna's sphere of heights
when they were hiking up to a friend's house at
the top of a hill. She described what happened on
a true crime show called City Confidential. And we start
to walk up and the ocean is like a five
(41:02):
Depp cut there, and this just a little thing of cactus.
There's no fencer or anything. And we start to walk
and she started to because she starts to completely freak out.
And I had no idea what was wrong. And she said,
I can't do this. I'm an agrophobiac. I'm petrified of heights.
I can't get near the edge. So the idea that
(41:23):
Anna had voluntarily climbed up onto the windowsill of an
apartment on the thirty fourth floor. The people who knew
Anna best were not buying it. Next time, on Death
of an Artist, I thought it is better to tell
him and say, look, I want a divorce. It never
(41:47):
occurred to me that he would kill her. I wrote
the article on the first anniversary of her death to
raise the profile of the case again and make it
too embarrassing for the district attorney to draw the case.
At one point it was what they believe was a
feminist cabal were about to get it. Sometimes people would
scream at you on the street. I used jilled at
(42:09):
him that he was a murderer. Death of an Artist
is a co production between Pushkin Industries, Something Else and
Sony Music Entertainment, Written and hosted by me Helen Mouldsworth.
Executive producers are Lizzie Jacobs, Tom kinnig Leetel Mulad, Jacob
Weissberg and Lucas Werner. Produced by Maria Luisa Tucker, editing
(42:32):
by Lizzie Jacobs. Our managing producer is Jacob Smith. Associate
producers are Pooge Rue and Eloise Linton. Additional production helped
by Tally Abacassas Annamandieto's quotes were read by Tanya Brigera,
engineered by Sam Baar, fact checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado.
Our theme song is by Pooge Rue. If you love
(43:02):
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 Sonymusic Entertainment at sonymusic dot com.
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