Civic institutions recruited avant-garde artists for official display in 1963

Evidence

In late 1963, the New York Times reported that the New York State Pavilion was to have “a decidedly avant-garde look.” The pavilion’s architect Philip Johnson had commissioned ten young painters and sculptors to create ten “spectacularly large works” for the exterior of the cylinder-shaped building. In addition to the relatively sanctioned painter Ellsworth Kelly and mixed-media virtuoso Robert Rauschenberg, the artists included a few outré types, notably smashed car assemblagist John Chamberlain and four proponents of Pop Art: Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist and Andy Warhol, whose contribution was the simplest and the most inflammatory. Riffing on the idea of public morals, he executed a mural of cropped and enlarged mugshots presenting the NYPD’s thirteen most wanted criminals. The mural was unveiled on April 14 and overpainted on April 17 (most likely at the governor’s request). — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 516

Categorization

• XREF: This is a concrete instance of the institutional co-option of avant-garde art — connects to the artist-as-advance-guard-of-gentrification thesis and to readings on how established power absorbs the shock of the new. Also undermines the pure adversarial-vs-mainstream binary.
• SEED: Angle: the sanitized mugshot mural — Warhol’s ‘most wanted’ list commissioned by a state government, then overpainted by that government — as the ur-example of institutions paying avant-garde artists to critique power and then censoring them. A neat micro-case for a piece on how the radical gets preemptively absorbed.