Introducing Death of an Artist: The Story of Ana Mendieta and Carl Andre

0:02 Anna Mendietta and Carl Andre were a textbook example of opposites attract two artists, a white man from New England who became famous in the sixties for his minimalist sculptures bricks, wood or metal placed directly on the floor, and a Cuban woman who had been forced from her homeland and discovered avant garde art in the middle of Iowa in the nineteen seventies. She basically staged what looked like blood in the doorway of a building, and it was extremely powerful.

0:34 I'm Helen Molesworth, an art historian, and I want to tell you the story of these two people. As artists and as lovers. They each push the boundaries of art and change the trajectory of art history. It could have been a love story, but instead it's a tragedy. Did she ever sound like she was afraid of him? Yes, that night he said, yeah, he's going to blow up if I have this conversation with him. In the early hours of September eighth, nineteen eighty five, Anna fell from the thirty fourth floor window of Carl's New York apartment.

1:10 Carl was charged with murder, and the art world started to split into There were those who couldn't believe such an artistic genius was capable of that kind of violence. How could Carl who revere then the purity of the desire, how could he have done such an act like that? And there were those who blame him for Anna's death, that us jailed at him, that he was a murderer.

1:34 This might have remained a story remembered only by art world insiders, except in the decades after her death. The world changed a lot, and while Carl's career has remained strong, Anna's has had a meteoric rise. So in twenty fourteen, when Carl Andre was celebrated with a big museum retrospective, Anna Mendieta's fans showed up in force, and for me, the question was, could the art world's unofficial rule that we separate the art from the artist still hold The work is separate from the individual it has to be.

2:21 Could I continue to love both Animandiettas and Carl Andre's work. It felt like the only way to answer that question was by asking another what really happened to Anna Mendieta. This is Death of an Artist Coming September twenty third from Pushkin Industries, Something Else and Sony Music Entertainment. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe to pushkin Plus and you can hear the whole season early and add free. Find Pushkin Plus on the Death of an Artist show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm, slash plus