0:07

Pushkin that

0:18

this show contains adult language

0:20

and occasional descriptions of violence.

0:22

Please keep that in mind when choosing

0:24

when and where to listen. Previously

0:29

on Death of an Artist. She

0:31

was very magnetic, but she was also

0:34

very very argumentative, and

0:36

so often people would end up in

0:38

a fight with her.

0:40

Yeah, Carl, Carl can be

0:43

really quite nice and wonderful, except

0:45

when he drinks too much, he

0:47

becomes the doctor jacquet

0:50

Worth emergency. Yeah. Yes,

0:53

my wife has committed suicide. We

0:55

had a chorl about the fact that

0:58

I was more exposed to the

1:00

public. That she went

1:02

to the bedroom and I went after her, and she

1:05

went out of the window. In

1:16

twenty fourteen, I made a pilgrimage

1:19

to one of the holy sites of the art world, Dia

1:22

Beacon. DIA

1:24

is a sprawling museum housed in an

1:26

old Nibisco factory in New York's Hudson

1:28

River Valley. It holds one

1:30

of the most impressive collections of minimal

1:32

and conceptual art in the world. The

1:35

work is always perfectly installed,

1:38

the vibe is one of purity,

1:41

more than anywhere else in the country. DIA

1:44

stands for the belief that art speaks

1:46

for itself. That it doesn't need institutional

1:49

interpretation. There are no

1:51

wall labels, no bells and whistles

1:53

designed to lure people in. It's

1:55

a place for true believers,

1:57

for artists, and for hardcore art

2:00

lovers like myself to go and look.

2:02

It's a place for art for art's

2:04

sake. DIA had just opened

2:07

the first ever American retrospective

2:10

of one of the fathers of minimalism,

2:12

Carl Andre. I

2:17

was in the midst of being courted for my dream

2:19

job, a chief curator position

2:21

in my favorite American city, Los

2:23

Angeles. His fate

2:26

would have it, it turned out that the person

2:28

doing the courting was also the person

2:30

responsible for the Carl Andre retrospective

2:33

at DIA, so it seemed like a good

2:35

idea to see the show. I

2:39

entered an enormous open gallery.

2:42

It was filled with both natural daylight

2:44

and Andre's minimal sculptures

2:47

metal plates arranged in a checkerboard

2:50

pattern on the refurbished hardwood

2:52

floors. It

2:54

was breathtaking. There

2:57

were large rectangular pieces of cedars

2:59

stacked in piles that resembled staircases,

3:02

a large table dotted with little

3:05

sculptures made of assembled bits

3:07

and bobs, all with witty titles,

3:11

terse poems typed in caps

3:13

on an old typewriter, or handwritten

3:16

in block mechanical lettering on graph

3:18

paper, each letter perfectly

3:21

occupying one square. After

3:25

I got my bearings, I asked one

3:27

of the security guards where the start of the exhibition

3:29

was. He said there wasn't

3:31

one. You could just start wherever. I

3:35

was a little disappointed. I love a

3:37

story with a beginning, middle, and end. As

3:40

I resigned myself to just wandering around,

3:43

my ego was too busy fantasizing

3:45

about that job in La to give room to

3:47

any of the questions in the back of my mind.

3:52

What happens when the art and ideas

3:55

we once thought were radical suddenly

3:57

seemed stayed conventional,

4:00

old fashioned? Even did

4:02

a man like Andrea deserve to be

4:04

celebrated, worshiped, even

4:07

at a place like Dia? And what

4:09

about Anamndieta. I

4:11

might have been avoiding these questions, but other

4:14

people were asking them, and they were

4:16

angry.

4:22

I'm your host, Helen Molesworth and

4:24

from Pushkin Industries, something Else

4:27

and Sony Music Entertainment. This

4:30

is Death of an Artist, Episode

4:39

two. What the Wall label Doesn't

4:42

tell You? After

4:48

Carl called nine one one. The police

4:51

showed up, expecting to find the aftermath of

4:53

a suicide, but when they arrived

4:56

things seemed off. The

5:00

brought Carl to the station, where two detectives

5:02

began questioning him. Detective

5:04

Richard Nieves still remembers

5:06

it. What he said to nine to eleven

5:09

was different than he told us

5:12

in the nine one one call. Carl

5:15

had told the operator that he and Anna

5:17

had had a fight about who was more famous,

5:19

and then he said, quote, I

5:22

went after her and she went out

5:24

the window. But

5:30

now he told us

5:32

that he didn't know what happened to her. She

5:34

just disappeared with two detectives

5:36

in front of him. He said he'd stayed up

5:39

watching TV after Anna went

5:41

to bed, and that when he went into the

5:43

bedroom to join her, he realized

5:45

she was not in the apartment. No

5:47

mention of any argument. We

5:50

confronted him on that

5:53

that he had two different stories, and he just

5:55

said, well, I said what I said, and that

5:58

was it. It's like he

6:01

was trying maybe to

6:03

tell us that, you know, just take my word for

6:05

it and shut up, and that's it. That's

6:08

all I'm going to say.

6:13

Meanwhile, an officer got a statement

6:15

from the doorman of a nearby building. He

6:18

had been on his way to get some coffee at the deli

6:20

below Carl's high rise apartment. That's

6:23

when he heard a woman's voice pleading no,

6:26

no, no, from somewhere above.

6:29

A few seconds later, the doorman

6:31

heard what sounded like an explosion. The

6:34

deli night manager said he heard it too,

6:36

but it sounded more like a thud, something

6:39

landing on the roof of the deli. Anna

6:42

had fallen. And

6:45

then there were the scratches. Nievis

6:47

and his colleague, a veteran detective

6:49

named Ron Finelli, asked Carl

6:51

about a scratch on his nose. Carl

6:54

said it had happened over a week ago.

6:58

He said that a straw gust of wind

7:01

when he was out in the terrorist said, shoved

7:04

the door into his face. But you know, a week

7:06

ago we would have been scabbed and tried. But

7:09

that the scratch, it

7:11

looked pretty new to me. Carl,

7:15

still at the police station, agreed to

7:17

return to his apartment with the detectives.

7:20

Detective Nieves noticed that the bedroom

7:22

was in disarray, an overturned chair,

7:24

tossled bedclothes, and in the kitchen

7:27

there were several empty wine and champagne bottles,

7:31

and one other thing stood out for Detective

7:34

Nieves, the window

7:36

sill. The weather was pretty

7:38

high. I understand that she was a short

7:40

woman, and in order for her to jump,

7:42

she would have had to go upon a chair on the

7:45

edge of the bed but

7:47

accidentally fall from that.

7:49

Now it's it's unless she was setting

7:51

up there, which I understand

7:54

that she was afraid of heights, so us that was not possible.

7:57

As they spoke, Carl offered to show

7:59

the dectives a catalog of his work.

8:02

I just looked at it, and he was proud

8:04

of it, and you know, and he was

8:07

saying that he was more successful than

8:09

she was. But then again, he was older

8:11

and he had many, you know, more

8:13

years of experience. The

8:18

crime scene squad dusted for prints and

8:20

took photographs. Carl asked

8:22

the cops if he could make some phone calls, and

8:25

then he phoned several friends to cancel dinner

8:27

plants. At no point

8:30

did Carl attempt to call on his family

8:32

to break the news. By this time,

8:34

the two detectives were starting to feel

8:36

like they had a murder on their hands. I

8:40

knew he was guilty. He was just covering

8:42

up. He was guilty of just kind

8:45

of picking her up and just

8:48

you know, just throwing her out the window.

8:51

She landed in between the Delhi and the

8:53

Chinese takeout. It may have been

8:55

the crime scene unit that said if she fell,

8:58

she would have fell here, not over there. The

9:01

police decided to take Carl back to the station

9:03

for more questioning. Word

9:05

began to spread that something terrible had

9:07

happened to Anna and that Carl was

9:09

about to be arrested. A group

9:12

of Carl's close friends, many

9:14

of whom were major players in the art world,

9:16

sprung into action. Toby

9:18

We went to a police station to ask

9:21

what had happened, not

9:24

just myself, but various and sundry other friends.

9:29

That's Lawrence Wiener, tall, bird,

9:32

thin, notoriously funny,

9:34

a man who almost always had

9:36

a cigarette in either his mouth or his

9:38

hand. He was a much loved

9:41

conceptual artist and one of Carl's

9:43

oldest friends. He

9:45

helped Carl find a lawyer, any

9:48

lawyer, and fast. Ultimately,

9:51

there would be three different lawyers who would come to

9:53

Carl's aid. First up

9:55

was Jerry Rosam. Lawyers

9:57

like want to get their nose into the tent as

10:00

soon as possible. He would trying to get control of

10:02

the case. I didn't have that,

10:05

you know feeling, is it thought that

10:11

that here was a really important

10:13

artist in need of some kind

10:15

of help. At the police station,

10:17

an assistant DA had shown up, a

10:20

young woman named Martha Bashford.

10:23

She made sure Carl understood his rights, requested

10:26

photography of the scratches not

10:28

only on his face, but on his upper left

10:30

arm as well, and asked

10:32

if he would be willing to have their conversation

10:35

videotaped. Just

10:37

then, Carl's lawyer showed up.

10:40

My advice to the

10:43

Carl was to not go any

10:45

further with any video statements.

10:48

From a legal point of view, I thought

10:50

that he would wasn't appropriate

10:54

for him to do. Carl

10:56

took his lawyer's advice and declined to make

10:58

a videotape statement. He also

11:00

said he didn't want to be photographed. When

11:03

the assistant DA heard Carl was

11:05

refusing both a video statement

11:08

and having his picture taken, that's

11:11

when Marsh I've said, f you if he's

11:13

under arrest now. He didn't

11:15

have a choice, and the detective found

11:17

another scratch, this time on his back,

11:19

right below his neck. After

11:21

pictures were taken, Carl was arraigned

11:24

and sent to Rikers. Meanwhile,

11:26

his lawyers were already working to bail

11:28

him out. And I just made an

11:31

argument that he was a very

11:33

famous artist, and they had like

11:35

a half million dosworth of art in

11:37

New York, and that

11:40

all of this was substantial collateral. That

11:42

basically there was no way for him to

11:45

go into hiding because he was such a public

11:47

person, even though you're a judge had probably

11:49

never heard of him, but you're this

11:52

is an esoteric art, world

11:55

contemporary art. So

11:57

I was able to portray that to the judge. Of the

11:59

judge set Bay Twitter fifty

12:01

thousand dollars, Carl's

12:03

second lawyer, Jerry Ordivar, was

12:05

tasked with getting a quarter million

12:07

dollars of bail money. They

12:10

called someone who liew

12:12

of Andre and would be sympathetic

12:15

and who would have the funds or the cloud to get

12:17

the funds. The turn to fifty thousand dollars

12:20

and he called his bank and they delivered

12:22

a check to me. That person was

12:25

Carl's equally famous friend, the

12:27

legendary painter Frank Stella.

12:33

Stella had made history with a game changing

12:36

suite of black paintings made

12:38

by dipping your average hardware store

12:40

brush into a can of house paint and

12:43

then meticulously covering the canvas

12:45

with stripes of black paint. Both

12:48

Andrea and Stella had attended the same prep

12:50

school, though their friendship started in

12:52

earnest when they moved to New York in hopes

12:54

of becoming artists. Stella

12:57

was rich and famous, and in this instance

12:59

he was also generous and loyal.

13:03

He worked with some of Carl's other friends

13:06

to gather the bail money as fast as possible,

13:09

and so the lawyer headed to

13:11

Rikers to pick up Carl along

13:13

with a two hundred and fifty thousand dollar check

13:16

and two passengers, artist

13:18

Lawrence Weiner and the renowned art

13:20

dealer Paula Cooper. Paula

13:22

was and still is Carl's gallerist

13:26

more than anyone else. Paula

13:28

was the person who made sure that Carl had

13:30

a place to show his work to the public

13:32

and to sell it to maintain his livelihood.

13:36

She's legendary because she was the first person

13:38

to set up shop in Soho, and she's

13:40

always been beloved by artists

13:43

because of her commitment to new ideas.

13:48

Carl waited in a cell away from

13:50

the general population, special

13:52

treatment because of his art world fame. They

13:56

bailed him out, and Lawrence Weener recalled

13:58

the somber drive back from jail. There's

14:01

four people sitting in a car in

14:05

absolute shock. The

14:07

truth was just the most horrendous

14:10

situation. No, Carl

14:12

is a very private man, and the only thing

14:14

he ever expressed to me was this

14:17

deep sense of loss that Anna wasn't

14:19

there. According

14:22

to Lawrence, there was no discussion

14:24

about what happened to Anna. I

14:26

don't intrude on my friends, and

14:29

that's not the kind of thing you can intrude on it. There

14:32

are two questions. You asked, you know what happened,

14:34

and somebody says no, and

14:36

then they say that there's a deep sense of loss. They

14:39

really are totally

14:41

broken up about it. And that's

14:43

the end of it. What else is there to say,

14:47

I confess this comment stuns me. This

14:50

instinct to be silent, to

14:52

never talk about it, to sweep it under

14:54

the rug, to think there's nothing

14:56

more to discuss. I

14:59

find this disturbed because silence

15:01

would ultimately be Carl's legal

15:03

strategy, and it's set the template

15:05

for the art world silence in the decades

15:08

that followed. To

15:20

understand how Carl came to have friends

15:23

with two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in their

15:25

back pocket, lawyers at the ready, and

15:27

then know how to get their friends sprung from jail

15:29

before you had to spend too many hours at rikers.

15:32

I'm going to have to take you back to the beginning. I'll

15:35

tell you the story the way Carl told it

15:37

in an interview for Art Forum.

15:39

I was born in Quincy, Massachusetts,

15:42

many many years ago. I

15:44

always liked art class. Whenever

15:47

I said that to my parents, boy, I loved

15:49

art class, and my father was thinking, of course,

15:51

let's clay. Carl's

15:56

father was an immigrant from Sweden who

15:58

worked as a marine raftsman at Quincy's

16:01

famous shipyards. He

16:04

read poetry at the dinner table and

16:07

forbade his wife to work. Carl

16:10

described his childhood playing in the salt

16:12

marshes of northern Massachusetts as

16:14

quote almost Ferrell. He

16:17

excelled in his public elementary school

16:20

and earned himself a full scholarship to

16:22

one of the East Coast's most prestigious

16:24

private schools, Phillips and Over

16:27

Academy. Even though Frank

16:29

Stella was one of cars Phillips

16:31

Academy classmates, they didn't meet

16:33

until after Carl moved to New York in nineteen

16:36

fifty seven. Frank even

16:38

let Carl use his studio for a while. Around

16:41

this time, Carl was mostly writing poetry

16:44

and made his living working on freight trains.

16:48

His four year stint working the railroad,

16:50

his friendship with Frank Stella, and

16:53

his childhood and Quincy would all

16:55

become part of his legend. Here

16:58

he is reading one of his poems. He has

17:00

Quincy Index one, a

17:02

list of words describing his birthplace.

17:05

Abigail Academy,

17:08

Adams, Adams, Adams,

17:11

Adams, Adams, Adams,

17:13

Adams, Adams, Adams,

17:15

Adams, Adams, Artery,

17:18

Atlantic Bay, Bethlem

17:21

Black's Blue, Boston, Brave,

17:24

broad Book. Carl wrote

17:26

poetry throughout his career, but

17:29

it would be the sculpture that really got him

17:31

noticed. Here

17:33

he is in a documentary about minimalism.

17:36

He's the first of eleven artists, all

17:39

white, all men. He

17:41

explains how he finds materials to put

17:43

together, usually sometime

17:46

once a day. I'm walking along

17:49

Mercy Street, walking between

17:51

the post office and the gallery.

17:54

We see Carl walking in a relatively

17:57

derelict street in Soho, which

17:59

in the nineteen sixties was still a

18:01

light manufacturing neighborhood, not yet

18:03

home to fancy renovated lofts

18:06

and the art galleries of the nineteen eighties

18:08

or the glorified shopping mall it's

18:10

become today. While

18:13

walking, Carl finds five or

18:15

six rectangular metal plates, which

18:17

he assembles into a line on the pavement.

18:20

Now, this is absolutely like gold.

18:23

Define these because these are the

18:25

materials of which I actually make

18:27

my sculptures. I

18:30

really like the elements, the aluminum

18:33

and copper, magnesium

18:36

and steel and lead and zinc.

18:41

As we watch him nudge the plates into

18:43

alignment with his foot, we see

18:45

the new art and the new artist at

18:47

work. Nothing is fixed,

18:50

no bolts, no welding. The

18:52

pieces are simply placed or stacked.

18:55

Everything can be picked up and moved around.

18:58

Nothing is permanent. The

19:01

act of assembling the work and the act of

19:03

walking on it or looking at it are

19:05

almost the same. All

19:08

of the acts ask you to think about

19:10

the space you are in and how

19:12

that space exists, both before and

19:14

after your arrival and departure.

19:18

This refusal to make anything like

19:20

a monument, or anything permanent,

19:23

or anything that related to what things looked like

19:25

before was completely

19:27

mind blowing for folks inside the art

19:29

world. I

19:32

remember in sixty five having a real epiphany.

19:34

I warked into the galler and there were piles

19:37

of bricks on the floor, and

19:39

I thought, oh, oh, there's some construction

19:41

going on. And I started to leave

19:43

the gallery and then I thought, wait a

19:45

minute, what if it's art? And

19:48

I went and aft and it went art, and

19:51

I got so excited. It

19:53

was like a like a revolutionary

19:55

moment. This is Peter Sheldall,

19:57

who, even at eighty years old,

20:00

as the enthusiasm and sprightly

20:02

energy of a teenager. He's

20:04

the renowned art critic for The New Yorker,

20:06

though back then he was mostly writing

20:09

for The Village Voice. It was

20:13

literal in the world, real

20:16

stuff, you know. Form

20:19

was condensed to tidiness,

20:23

and it was about me.

20:25

It was about my presence barking

20:28

around these things. It was such

20:30

a cleanliness and dignity

20:32

and insolence about

20:35

it. I got a sense of a revolution and

20:37

that I was here at the start. It

20:40

was something that shifted, shifted

20:42

to culture. You know. I was like a pivot and

20:47

nothing that's quite the same afterwards. That's

20:49

high praise coming from someone who saw

20:52

almost every exhibition there was to see

20:54

in New York during the nineteen sixties and seventies.

20:57

But then Peter actually met Carl

21:00

when I'm matt him did

21:02

not like him. You know

21:04

what he would say, Prima

21:07

Donna and a bully. In

21:09

the before times, like before

21:11

the Internet, even the New York

21:14

art world basically revolved around a

21:16

handful of bars and restaurants in Lower

21:18

Manhattan. Bars

21:22

such as the Cedar Tavern and Max's

21:24

Kansas City regularly get name

21:26

checked in the art history books. The

21:29

basic template remained the same. An

21:32

art bar is a kind of divy bar where

21:34

you just show up and know that folks

21:36

would be there. In my day, it

21:38

was the Shark Bar on Prince Street. Once

21:41

they're people, okay,

21:44

mostly men, raged on about

21:46

this that or the other art theory and so

21:48

and so's latest exhibition or whatever

21:51

exhibition review had been published in last

21:53

week's New York Times. Bars

21:55

were where high stakes ideas and

21:58

strongly held feelings got mixed with

22:00

politics and booze to get sorted

22:02

out in a major way. And

22:05

so at one of these art

22:07

bars Peter and Carl met.

22:12

I started talking to him, and he said, you're like Frank

22:14

O'Hara, right, Frank O'Hara

22:17

was a prominent poet as well as a young

22:19

curator at the Museum of Modern Art. And

22:22

then he started running down Frank O'Hara,

22:25

and I gave him

22:27

the finger and laid my finger up an indoctive

22:29

nose, and you know, and

22:31

I'm still marveling

22:34

that he didn't kill me. I mean he

22:38

could have. He was a strong man.

22:40

I mean, it's right, and I was. I

22:43

was a skinny poet and

22:47

we were drunk. I was drunk. Did you continue

22:49

to see andre in bars?

22:53

I see him, but but not not

22:57

talked to him. Disavoided him.

23:00

You avoided it. Real Peter's

23:03

version of the nineteen sixties art world

23:05

sounds like West Side Story, complete

23:07

with rival art gangs scoping

23:09

out different parts of SOHO, and

23:11

much of the action took place at Max's

23:14

Kansas City. The division

23:16

was between the Warhole

23:19

people and the minimalist people. The

23:22

minimalist people were on the front along

23:25

the bar, and

23:27

the Warhole people were in the back room. And

23:29

I could say that going in was

23:32

like walking past heavy metal to Strawberry

23:34

Shortcake. And

23:39

I went to the Warhold people. I'm

23:41

not sure how much the Insider Baseball is

23:43

translating here, so for those

23:45

of you who aren't up to speed on your art

23:47

world posses. Shortcake

23:50

refers to Warhole's

23:52

notoriously Swiss friends

23:55

as they were called back in the day, meaning

23:58

gay people and anyone on the fringe

24:00

of white masculinity circa

24:02

nineteen sixty You went to the Shortcake,

24:06

Yeah, well, I mean it was I felt

24:08

comfortable there. All the

24:11

minimums are ashall Robert's

24:13

mission, well, Donald, Judge, Jesus,

24:16

Hey, I'll accept shallow

24:18

wit who was an

24:21

angel in human form. What a wonderful

24:23

guy. Okay, back

24:25

to the main story. The other

24:28

thing Carl was getting noticed for were

24:30

his politics. He was an important

24:33

member of the art Workers Coalition. Art

24:36

historian Julia Brian Wilson describes

24:38

it this way. Artworkers Coalition

24:41

was a brief lived artists

24:43

rights organization that came together

24:45

in nineteen sixty nine, originally

24:48

around issues of kind of

24:50

artists rights visa VI the museum

24:52

and the institution. Does the museum have the

24:54

right to display an artist's work in

24:56

a way that the artist doesn't want or intent,

24:59

and very quickly demanded

25:02

a whole slate of things that included

25:05

more representation around African American

25:07

artists and Puerto Rican artists. Carl

25:10

was known as the resident Marxist

25:12

of the group. He

25:15

was the one who seemed to have actually

25:17

read Carl Marx. I

25:20

probably first read Carl's

25:22

Artworkers Coalition Statement and grad

25:24

school, and I'm just as

25:26

enthralled with it now as I was then.

25:29

It's so badass. The

25:31

problem, he says, is not museums,

25:34

but this baggy thing called the art

25:37

world, a world he thinks

25:39

should cease to exist. No

25:42

galleries standing in between the artist

25:44

and the collector, no critic

25:46

in between the artists and the public, just

25:49

artists making work for themselves

25:52

and anyone else who shows up with interest

25:54

and curiosity. Written

25:56

in nineteen sixty nine, it's still

25:59

a kind of utopia I could get behind.

26:06

The Fact is Carl might not have

26:08

always been well liked, but damn

26:10

if he didn't have good politics. There

26:12

was Carl the anti war activist and

26:15

Carl the Artworker's Coalition activist,

26:18

and there was also the Carl who sent checks

26:20

to feminist causes. Between his

26:23

groundbreaking work, his sharp tongue,

26:25

and that he showed at the trailblazing Paula Cooper

26:27

Gallery. All of this contributed

26:30

to a reputation that was hard to be denied.

26:35

But Carl's official biography,

26:37

the one that would appear in every exhibition

26:40

catalog about his work, started

26:42

and stopped with Quincy and the

26:44

railroad job. And

26:47

this is pretty much the standard of how

26:49

artists were discussed, birthplace,

26:52

school, other important men

26:55

they knew, with little to no mention

26:57

of the wives, lovers, or

27:00

children they spent their lives with. Carl

27:14

Andre spent six years of his life

27:16

with Anna Mendieta. Anna

27:21

was born into a well to do family in

27:23

Havana. Both of her parents,

27:25

Ignacio and Raquel, came

27:27

from political families dotted with

27:30

generations of military men and

27:32

politicians. Her father,

27:34

a lawyer, carried on this tradition

27:37

and was an early supporter of Fidel

27:39

Castro. Their house

27:42

in Havana bustled with extended family

27:44

and maids and cooks. They

27:47

spent a lot of time at a family beach house

27:49

that has been called a mansion. It

27:51

was in Varadero Beach, a long

27:53

stretch of white sand that has been a resort

27:56

destination for decades. Her

27:58

friend Talia Delgado,

28:01

whose family socialized with the Mendiettas

28:03

in Varadero remembered it this

28:05

way. I remember going to the beach

28:08

to Bararedo, where her family used to also

28:10

go. Our lives were pretty easy,

28:13

filled with a lot of caretakers,

28:16

an extended family, and

28:18

Anna's outspokenness. Well apparently

28:21

that started pretty early. She was

28:24

very, very strong, determined

28:26

person, even as a child. I remember

28:29

telling me that whenever her parents had

28:31

a fight, she would go in and spreak

28:34

it up and say, I don't want to hear any

28:36

more of this, because if you fight, you're going

28:38

to break up, and if you break up,

28:40

it's going to be terrible for me and for my

28:43

siblings. So you have to really keep it together

28:45

and work this out. This

28:50

idyllic childhood would not last.

28:53

This was the scene of turmoil in the capital

28:55

Havana as the climax of revolution

28:58

was reached. Anyone suspect of

29:00

sympathy for the Bautista regime came in for

29:02

a rough time. In

29:05

nineteen fifty nine, when Anna was eleven

29:07

years old, Fidel Castro's

29:09

Revolutionary Army forced

29:11

President Bautista out of power. At

29:14

first, Anna's father was swept up

29:17

in the new wave of optimism and possibility

29:19

that Castro represented, and he

29:21

secured his place in the new government. However,

29:25

as Castro began to crack down on Cubans

29:28

with ties to American businesses,

29:30

Ignazio Mendieta came under

29:33

fire. The collective promise

29:35

that was made was

29:38

slowly being taken over by

29:40

a very autocratic managerial

29:45

policy. This is Tanya Brigera,

29:47

a Cuban artist, an activist.

29:50

You've heard her as our voice of Anna, but

29:52

she's also something of an expert about

29:55

Cuba's autocratic policies. She's

29:57

been detained several times by the

30:00

Cuban authorities because of her

30:02

art and her activism. At

30:04

some point, Castro

30:07

started deciding thing without consulting

30:09

anybody. He started, you

30:11

know, having an autonomy that you should

30:13

not have the president. He was very

30:16

clear from the nineteen

30:18

fifty nine that it was with him

30:20

or against him. While Anna's

30:23

father maintained public support for Castro,

30:25

he refused to join the Communist Party

30:28

and ultimately became an elite

30:30

counter revolutionary, working

30:32

clandestinely to challenge Castro's

30:35

power. Anna and her

30:37

sister rat Clean followed in

30:39

his footsteps, going so far as to

30:41

hand out anti Castro leaflets. This

30:44

is what Anna told a reporter in one of her

30:47

very few filmed interviews Miami.

30:52

Tanya translates, my

30:55

grandmama politicized me since I was a younger

30:57

in Cardines. She always told me all

31:00

the war stories, all this story of

31:02

Cuba, everything about that side of

31:04

the family. By nineteen

31:06

sixty, things were starting to get dangerous for

31:09

the Mendietta family. Ultimately,

31:11

Ignazio would be arrested and sentenced

31:14

to twenty years in prison. But

31:16

right before that happened, the family made

31:18

the difficult decision to send Anna and

31:21

her sister to the United States as

31:23

part of a secret Cold War program

31:26

that sent Cuban children to America.

31:29

On his mother pregnant with her third child,

31:31

her husband and trouble stayed

31:33

behind. Please, he's from

31:36

Cuba. He's

31:41

going to stay here a WHI. It's

31:45

a refugee camp. He's

31:49

a refugee. The

31:51

audio you're hearing is from a film made

31:53

by the US government designed to

31:55

explain to thousands of Cuban children

31:58

why their parents had sent them away. When

32:03

you are sending away to school for the first

32:05

time, or you go away

32:08

to come, everything is

32:10

strange. Every body's

32:13

strange. This is just an

32:15

in between plays, or you wait until

32:18

they find you a foster home. Somewhere

32:20

in the United Anna and Raclean

32:23

joined the fourteen thousand other children

32:25

flown to the US as part of Operation

32:27

Peter Pan. Where they landed

32:29

was a far cry from never never Land.

32:32

The sisters boarded a plane in tropical,

32:34

cosmopolitan Havana. They

32:37

eventually ended up in the flat, cold

32:39

corn fields of Iowa and were

32:41

immediately sent to a Catholic orphanage.

32:45

They get off the plane in Iowa and this

32:47

priest comes on to tell them how they're

32:50

very lucky to be in the United

32:52

States, and the United States has a lot of development.

32:55

For example, he said, look at

32:57

this, we have ballot pans. And

33:00

Anna and her sister looked at each other like,

33:02

oh my god, where we ended

33:04

up. I mean, they knew all about poppointments

33:07

in Cuba, and they were just really

33:09

shocked by the lack of

33:11

knowledge really of who these

33:13

kids were and where they were coming from.

33:19

It's hard to imagine these two sisters

33:22

ripped from their beach house, their big extended

33:24

family, their social status, and

33:27

suddenly placed in an orphanage organized

33:29

by age, which meant they were immediately

33:32

separated. The

33:34

sisters were shuffled through a few different

33:36

foster homes and a boarding school, all

33:38

of which made the temporary separation

33:41

from their parents feel more

33:43

and more permanent. This

33:45

displacement, as emotional as

33:47

it was physical, would have a profound

33:50

effect. Here's Anna's

33:52

friend be Ruby Rich. She's

33:55

lied to about where she and her sister are

33:57

being sent. They are both lied to

33:59

about being kept together. They're allied

34:01

to about going to a home like their own. They're

34:04

allied to about everything, and over

34:06

and over, every time they moved, they allied to again.

34:09

So she not only has no control as a child,

34:12

but she is absolutely

34:14

betrayed as a child repeatedly.

34:17

And I think that must have left

34:19

a really deep mark. Years

34:22

later, Anna described the long lasting

34:24

effect of this displacement to a group

34:26

of college students. Here's

34:28

Tanya Brigera voicing Anna again,

34:31

since I left Cuba when I was twelve

34:33

because of the political situation there, that

34:36

mark has marked, you

34:38

know, an aspect of my life, so

34:41

that I have failed, that I was

34:43

torn away from the womb, from

34:45

the modern land. Miraculously,

34:51

despite all of this trauma, both

34:54

sisters managed to graduate from high

34:56

school and by the time their mother and little

34:58

brother joined them nineteen sixty six,

35:01

Anna had already discovered her calling.

35:04

She wanted to be an artist. I

35:07

think also that she's intoxicated

35:10

by art making. I think

35:12

it delivers her to herself in

35:14

a way that nothing else had.

35:17

And I think she's able there to put together

35:19

all the different parts of her

35:22

personality and her life and

35:24

make something powerful out

35:26

of that. And she'd been powerless,

35:28

very powerless for a very

35:31

key part of her life, and I

35:33

think that part of her really needed filling up

35:35

with its opposite. What

35:44

happened next was one of those plot twists

35:46

that can only be called fate. On

35:48

a transferred to the University of Iowa,

35:51

where against all the odds, she

35:53

ended up enrolled in one of the most avant garde

35:56

art departments in the country, led

35:58

by a guy named Hans Brader. Brader

36:01

came out of a super radical group of

36:03

performance artists, and he was

36:05

inviting all of the most cutting edge

36:07

people from New York to come in lecture at

36:09

the university. Brader's

36:11

radical program was like a portal to another

36:14

world, and Anna went right through

36:16

it. He identified her energy

36:18

immediately and the two became lovers

36:21

yep. Anna was that girl, the

36:23

super smart one, the wild one, the

36:26

one that slept with the teacher. But

36:28

their thing was no flash in the pam. They stayed

36:30

together for years. While

36:35

she was in Iowa, she moved from painting to

36:37

performance. She said paintings

36:39

were an illusion. They weren't real enough

36:41

for her. What was real

36:43

to her was trying to figure out the violence

36:46

of the world around her, specifically

36:48

the rape and murder that had recently happened

36:51

on campus. In one

36:53

performance, she invited viewers into

36:55

her apartment where she was stripped

36:57

down, bent over a table, and

37:00

covered with animal blood. She

37:02

was just as radical as the artist from New York,

37:05

and that's where she was headed. In

37:09

January of nineteen seventy eight, Anna

37:11

moved to New York City. Hans

37:14

helped her get situated by introducing her

37:16

to artists, one of whom was the filmmaker

37:18

Ella Troyano. Here's how

37:20

Ella remembered Anna when she first arrived

37:22

in Manhattan. I remember she had

37:25

this notebook where she was so

37:28

worried about money that she was writing

37:30

down in a column every single thing

37:32

that she spent money on. Every

37:35

day. Anna Wood brag that

37:37

she furnished her entire apartment with stuff

37:39

she found on the street. Mattress and all

37:42

her early years in New York were a whirlwind.

37:46

She worked whatever job she could to make ends

37:48

meet, and she was slowly gaining traction

37:51

in the art world, appearing in group

37:53

shows, making all the right connections, and

37:55

eventually she met Carl. Here's

38:01

ele Troiano again. You've

38:03

got somebody who is in the city

38:05

who totally believes an art, who is very,

38:08

very poor, is

38:10

working her ass off to get

38:12

to situations where she can meet people

38:15

that can give her a show, and

38:17

she does everything right. And

38:20

here is somebody all of

38:22

a sudden, who, by the way,

38:24

looks a little bit like Hans

38:26

Braider. Looking at pictures

38:28

of Carl and Hans, you can clearly

38:30

see that Anna had a type. They

38:33

were both stocky and bearded,

38:35

bearish kind of men. When

38:38

Carl came courting, some of Anna's friends

38:40

even called him Hans of the East.

38:43

And you know, Hans was a sweetheart, but

38:45

Carl was less of a sweetheart and more

38:48

of an unlikely lefario.

38:51

One reporter even called him one of

38:53

the art world's most notorious

38:56

womanizers. You know, this

38:58

guy is now wooing her the way

39:00

he loves wooing with champagne,

39:03

expensive dinners. And this is somebody who's

39:05

writing down I have ten cents

39:07

that I used to put on a stamp

39:10

or whatever. That's enticing.

39:12

But it wasn't just the bubbly and the coin. Carl

39:15

had something much more important to offer

39:17

an artist newly arrived in the city.

39:21

Carl had an entry into

39:23

every gallery and every museum. But

39:25

I do think that she really

39:28

loved him, and she thought

39:31

that she knew who he was.

39:36

While Carl and on his relationship went

39:38

up and down, on his career was on a

39:41

steady climb. She'd been getting

39:43

good teaching gigs, and she was starting

39:45

to win awards and grants, and

39:48

then she won the prestigious pre

39:50

Drome, a fellowship that came

39:52

with an all expensive paid apartment and studio

39:55

in Italy. It was almost too

39:57

good to be true. She moved to

39:59

Rome and October nineteen eighty three and

40:01

immediately took to it. She

40:04

loved her life in Rome. She told

40:06

me that she felt that finally she could put

40:08

together New York and Cuba, and

40:11

it was called Roma. This is be Ruby

40:13

rich again. She had so much nerve.

40:15

I mean, she would pretty much do anything she wanted to do. She

40:18

was not a fearful person,

40:20

except interestingly when it came to heights.

40:24

I want to pause here. This seems

40:27

like a negligible detail, but

40:29

Honest's sphere of heights would become an important

40:32

part of the story. Everyone seemed

40:34

to have a story about how afraid she was, But

40:39

the anecdote that would make it to trial was

40:41

from Marcia Pelle's, one of Anna's

40:43

friends in Rome. Marsha

40:46

learned about Honna's sphere of heights when they were

40:48

hiking up to a friend's house at the top

40:50

of a hill. She described

40:52

what happened on a true crime show called

40:55

City Confidential. And we

40:57

start to walk up and the ocean is like a five

41:02

Depp cut there, and this just

41:05

a little thing of cactus. There's no fencer

41:07

or anything. And we start to walk and she

41:09

started to because she starts to completely freak out.

41:12

And I had no idea what was wrong. And

41:14

she said, I can't do this. I'm an agrophobiac.

41:17

I'm petrified of heights. I can't get near the

41:19

edge. So

41:22

the idea that Anna had voluntarily

41:25

climbed up onto the windowsill of an apartment

41:27

on the thirty fourth floor. The

41:31

people who knew Anna best were not buying

41:33

it. Next

41:38

time, on Death of an Artist, I

41:41

thought it is better to tell him and

41:44

say, look, I want a divorce. It

41:46

never occurred to me that he would kill her. I

41:49

wrote the article on the first anniversary of

41:51

her death to raise

41:53

the profile of the case again and

41:56

make it too embarrassing for the district

41:59

attorney to draw the case. At

42:01

one point it was what they believe was a feminist

42:04

cabal were about to get it. Sometimes

42:06

people would scream at you on the street. I

42:08

used jilled at him that he was a murderer. Death

42:14

of an Artist is a co production between

42:16

Pushkin Industries, Something Else

42:18

and Sony Music Entertainment, Written

42:20

and hosted by me Helen Mouldsworth.

42:23

Executive producers are Lizzie Jacobs,

42:25

Tom kinnig Leetel Mulad, Jacob

42:27

Weissberg and Lucas Werner. Produced

42:29

by Maria Luisa Tucker, editing

42:32

by Lizzie Jacobs. Our managing

42:34

producer is Jacob Smith. Associate

42:36

producers are Pooge Rue and Eloise

42:39

Linton. Additional production helped

42:41

by Tally Abacassas Annamandieto's

42:43

quotes were read by Tanya Brigera, engineered

42:46

by Sam Baar, fact checking by Andrea

42:49

Lopez Crusado. Our theme

42:51

song is by Pooge Rue. If

43:01

you love this show, consider subscribing

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to pushkin Plus to listen early, add

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free and get exclusive bonus content.

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Look for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple

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Podcasts or at pushkin dot

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