When Donald Trump Destroyed Monumental Art
On the Fourth of July of 2020, President Donald Trump flew to South Dakota and addressed the nation from Mount Rushmore National Memorial.
“We will never let them rip America’s heroes from our monuments, or from our hearts,” Trump said. “By tearing down Washington and Jefferson, these radicals would tear down the very heritage for which these men gave their lives to win the Civil War; they would erase the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic.’”[1]
It was unclear if he knew that Washington died in 1799 and Jefferson in 1826, decades before the Civil War began on April 11, 1861. Trump continued: “Make no mistake: this left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution. … To make this possible, they are determined to tear down every statue, symbol, and memory of our national heritage.”[2]
This position would seem to be at odds with Trump the New York developer back in 1980.
Why? That’s when Trump deliberately destroyed an irreplaceable work of art — two Art Deco friezes that graced the Bonwit Teller building on Fifth Avenue — and that was promised to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The premeditated destruction of monumental art is one of the acts that compelled Graydon Carter, then editor of the satirical magazine Spy, to mock the future president as “a short-fingered vulgarian.”
There was public outrage at the time, of course. “Architectural sculpture of this quality is rare and would have made definite sense in our collections,” Ashton Hawkins, then vice president and secretary of the Met’s board of trustees told Robert McFadden of the New York Times.[3] Trump, pretending to be his own spokesman, defended his decision. Trump’s fictional alter ego — “John Baron” — ied to reporters when he stated that “[t]he merit of these stones was not great enough to justify the efforts to save them.”[4] Hawkins disagreed. “Can you imagine the museum accepting them if they were not of artistic merit?” he replied. “Architectural sculpture of this quality is rare and would have made definite sense in our collections. Their monetary value was not what we were interested in. The department of 20th-century art was interested in having them because of their artistic merit.” [5]
More than three decades later, the loss of the building was still lamented. Writing in the New York Times in 2014, Christopher Gray succinctly recalled the loss: “The Bonwit Teller store is another lost landmark of the time when the 57th Street area was the home of suave and sophisticated shops instead of the brash hyperscraper. Designed in 1929 as the Stewart & Company store, it had an entranceway that was a stupendously luxurious mix of limestone, bronze, platinum and hammered aluminum.”[6]
When Trump sought the presidency in 2016, the sting of loss was remembered once again. “On his orders, the demolition workers cut up the grillwork with acetylene torches,” Harry Hurt III wrote in Lost Tycoon, a lowbrow takedown of Trump published in 1996 for millennial readers. The book was reprinted in 2016 for the benefit of Generation Z. “Then they jackhammered the friezes, dislodged them with crowbars, and pushed the remains inside the building, where they fell to the floor and shattered in a million pieces.”[7]
Trump, quite simply, chose to destroy monumental art. The ethnocentric slant in these Anglophone accounts misses the larger cultural importance of Bonwit Teller’s friezes to Hispanophones. It is this: these works loomed large in the Hispanic imagination and affection for New York. Trump’s destruction of masterpieces Hispanics cherished in 1980, in fact, foreshadowed his riding down the escalator of Trump Tower in 2015 to announce his candidacy for the presidency by vilifying Hispanics when he characterized Mexicans as “rapists.”
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he told supporters and reporters. “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Trump said this while a Mexican employee, wearing a “Trump Ice Cream” cap, a few feet away, manned his station in the lobby of Trump Tower scooping ice cream.[8]
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Stewart & Company constructed the Art Deco building in 1929.[9] Warren & Wetmore designed the high-rise. Whitney Warren and Charles Wetmore were a team of extraordinary architects who gave New York landmarks renowned throughout the world. Their masterpieces include the New York Yacht Club, on West 44th Street (1901); a Gothic Chapel at Green-Wood Cemetery (1911); Grand Central Terminal at 42nd Street and Park Avenue (1913); the Hemsley Building, adjacent to Grand Central Terminal on Park Avenue (1913); the Crown Building at 57th Street and Fifth Avenue (1921); and Steinway Hall on West 57th Street across from Carnegie Hall (1925).
The friezes in question consisted of limestone bas-relief sculptures of two naked women brandishing large scarves, as Frenchwomen are known to do. They gave the appearance of performing a Martha Graham dance, scarves-as-veils. That was precisely the intention of Rene Paul Chambellan, the American sculptor who was an advocate of the “French Modern Style,” also known as Zigzag Moderne. As he is said to have remarked of the American Radiator and Stewart & Company structures: “Grand buildings require loving muses to watch over them.”
Acerbic architecture critic George Chappel, writing in the New Yorker in 1929, dismissed Chambellan’s muses as “quite beautiful ladies wearing practically nothing.”[10]
The building opened a few months before the stock market crashed in October 1929. Stewart & Company filed for bankruptcy only months after the grand opening. A few months later, Bonwit Teller took over. It hired architect Ely Jacques Kahn to remodel the building, inside and out. The naked ladies on the building’s façade were untouched. It opened on September 15, 1930. This is how the New York Times, on September 14, 1930, reported on Bonwit Teller’s transformation: “In taking over the Stewart Building Bonwit Teller found it necessary to reconstruct the interior and make radical external changes to fit the physical necessities of their organization. The general layout of the shop has been so changed as to achieve twice the space on the main floor obtainable under the original plan. Lighting and ventilation facilities also have been increased.”
Bonwit Teller, previously on 18th street, now found itself in a shopping district that included legendary retailers such as Saks Fifth Avenue, Peck & Peck, Henri Bendel, Milgrim, and Bergdorf Goodman, and it found new success. It was the place where well-to-do and in-the-know New Yorkers went to shop — and shop they did. In a matter of years, the friezes became Bonwit Teller’s signature. These icons were embossed, for special occasions, on stationery and gift boxes.
It was not until Christmas 1936, however, that Bonwit Teller entered the Hispanic imagination in a way that no other New York retailer would ever do.
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In 1936 the Museum of Modern Art presented an exhibition that introduced Americans to emerging European prewar sensibilities: Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism. The exhibition featured fourteen works by Salvador Dalí and was a smashing success. Bonwit Teller, in fact, decided to commission Dalí to design windows for its Christmas season in order to make the most of Surrealism’s New York moment. Dalí was to design one window. Seven others would be inspired by Dalí’s original design. This was the first time Surrealist art was featured in an American showcase window for the public to enjoy.
What could go wrong?
Dalí presented the sketch of his vision: “She was a Surrealist Woman like a Figure in a Dream.” The design included a bathtub lined with Persian lamb fur and was filled, halfway, with muddy water. Management signed off. Dalí went to work. He was pleased with himself.
But Dalí, ultimately, was a Spanish naïf in a city of modern Puritan commerce that had little use for the absurd. Writing of the incident in Windows: The Art of Retail Display, Mary Portas reports that Bonwit Teller was not pleased when they saw Dalí’s completed installation. They removed the bathtub but allowed the other elements, including hands reaching through the walls, mirrors, and debris on the floor, to remain intact. The other windows featuring Surrealist paintings and mannequins, dressed in elegant evening gowns, were not objectionable.
When Dalí returned to Bonwit Teller after taking his customary bath in goat milk at his suite at the nearby St. Regis Hotel, he was furious. He demanded that the bathtub be put back. Senior management was summoned. An argument ensued in English, Spanish, and French. (Dalí’s wife, Gala, was summoned in an attempt to calm him down; Gala insisted on speaking French to people who did not speak that language.) Dalí would not allow any modification to his artistic vision. He then turned his back on management and bolted for the showcase window to repair the desecration. Gala turned to management and declared, “Il fera ce qu’il doit faire!”
The police report is contradictory over what happened next. One section describes a tug of war between Dalí and two managers in which a bucket of muddied water spilled, sending the men to the floor and the bathtub through the window and onto the sidewalk. Another statement describes an infuriated Dalí deliberately hurling the bathtub in an act of Surrealist outrage. Gala’s two-word declaration to the police: “Défenestration, hélas.”
Dalí was placed under arrest. Salvador Dalí en escándalo en Nueva York was the headline telegraphed throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Suddenly, from Madrid to Buenos Aires, Mexico City to Bogotá, everyone knew of Bonwit Teller, even if those two words don’t roll off a Spanish speaker’s tongue easily. Photographs that accompanied the tabloid stories featured the friezes of the two naked ladies. Thus Bonwit Teller became las desnudas — the naked ladies — throughout the Hispanic world.
Everyone in New York wanted to visit Bonwit Teller to see the scene of the “Surrealist Scandal.” Everyone in the Hispanic world understood that, according to the sensational newspaper accounts, las desnudas was the one store where management had the maturity to stand up to Dalí’s petulant tantrums.[11] Gala knew this was an opportune moment to ask for a more generous discount.
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This is how Bonwit Teller came to eclipse Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman in the Hispanic imagination. I have no memory of ever visiting the flagship store, but I may have been taken there as a child. I do know that a favorite aunt made a monthly visit, alone or with her girlfriends, for years.
The Hispanic imagination? A digression is in order.
Teddy, a favorite uncle, worked at the University Club, located two blocks away on 54th Street from Bonwit Teller. To understand his character, consider the following. He lived in New York, a city he loved, his entire adult life. He also loved to travel because he knew New York would be waiting for him. On a trip to Miami in the 1960s, he, then middle-aged, met a delightful woman, Luisa. She had fled the Cuban Revolution. She was a widow. Her husband had been a surgeon in Havana; their adult children were out in the world. Despite the obstacles of early widowhood and being forced to leave her home as an unwanted exile, she was vivacious, resilient, and refused to be defeated by life. Uncle Teddy was smitten, taken by her optimism, easy laugh, and effervescent personality.
They dispensed with everything, except impulse. They married after a few months. Luisa moved to New York. A little over a year later, they divorced. She returned to Miami. A year after that, they found themselves at the same dinner party. They reconciled and married for a second time. This marriage lasted five years. After their second divorce, she returned to Miami. Later that year, Uncle Teddy met, in New York, a ravishing woman from somewhere between Dresden and Prague named Aurora. It was a whirlwind romance. They married four months after meeting. A divorce followed before their second anniversary.
Despondent, Uncle Teddy visited relatives in Miami to forget about this disappointment. Missing her, he called Luisa. She agreed to get together for a social visit. They went to Vizcaya, which she had always wanted to visit but had been afraid of running into too many parties shooting photographs for their weddings or some such thing. At lunch afterward, Uncle Teddy told me, she rhetorically commented, “So many wedding shoots at Vizcaya! Why don’t people take pictures of their divorce instead? Now, those are more memorable!” He rolled his eyes, smiled, and then replied: “For the same reason people don’t take family portraits at funerals.” They laughed. “Then we stared at each other, and we both knew,” he continued.
Aunt Luisa then told him there was no reason to be sad: she still loved him. The next day they went to the City Clerk for their third marriage license. Luisa returned to New York with him. This time the marriage lasted until my uncle’s death more than a decade later.
Throughout their married life in New York, they had a standing date: once a month she would come into Manhattan. They would see a show or go to a concert or attend a gallery opening. Then they would have dinner at a restaurant that was making a buzz. When reservations were unavailable, his position at the University Club usually secured a table for two. Aunt Luisa would arrive an hour earlier to go shopping — de compras — at las desnudas. She would go by herself, or with girlfriends. (Naomi and Barbara were two of her friends who often made the monthly pilgrimage with her to the shop where Dalí caused a commotion.) Uncle Teddy knew the drill involved her de compras jaunts at las denudas. She told him she would only look at things that were on sale, but she didn’t. She said she would only buy “something small,” but a day or two later a messenger from Bonwit Teller would drop off a package for Aunt Luisa at the University Club.
Bonwit Teller prospered through the 1940s and 1950s because of, to a significant degree, their loyal following: Hispanic women in New York and Latin American visitors insisted on shopping at the store the infamous Dalí made famous. Aunt Luisa often ran into someone she knew at las desnudas, or was taken aback by how much Spanish was spoken by women whispering among themselves. She knew which were from Spain by their accents, Argentina by their sartorial style, Caribbean by their mannerisms, and Mexican by their manners. “It felt like an event at the Hispanic Society,” she commented, laughing.
Then things changed. In 1956 Genesco acquired the company from the Hoving Corporation. The management of this conglomerate didn’t fully understand what was involved in creating a cutting-edge reputation in fashion.[12] As the 1960s became the 1970s, Bonwit Teller began to falter. In 1979, Allied Stores Corporation acquired Bonwit’s. Its first decision was to close the flagship store on Fifth Avenue. The last day the flagship store was open to the public was May 19, 1979.
Writing in the New York Times the day after the end, Judith Cummings reported, “Bonwit Teller closed its Fifth Avenue retail operation for the last time yesterday, passing the way of the Savoy Plaza Hotel as an enduring standard of elegance on the avenue. What was left of such an era ended yesterday, amid emptied racks and tag-end reductions for last-day shoppers at the 49-year-old specialty store next to Tiffany’s. A Manhattan real-estate developer, Donald Trump, who paid $15 million for the Bonwit property, has proposed tearing the store down to erect in its place a $100 million, 60 story skyscraper, with a mix of apartments, offices and shops.”
By this time Dalí had grown old and was ill. His relationship with Gala became convoluted; allegations of her supplying him with pharmaceuticals overshadowed the amusing escándalo en Nueva York at las desnudas. They no longer lived together. There were lawsuits. For their part my Uncle Teddy and Aunt Luisa, also getting on in years, retired to Florida two years after Trump acquired the shuttered Bonwit Teller store. Uncle Teddy lamented how “philistines” were overrunning New York in the 1980s.
He had been friendly with Tom Wolfe; they had a tailor in common and met when both men were having alterations. “Tom’s working on a story of vulgarians coming out from everywhere,” he told me. “He’s right about that.” In 1987, he returned to New York for the book party of Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. Aunt Luisa accompanied him, but she had no interest in shopping at Bonwit Teller’s other locations: she only wanted to shop at las desnudas. That was now impossible.
Aunt Luisa considered the destruction of las denudas an assault on Hispanic sensibilities and an affront to the cultural history of Hispanic women shopping in New York. It was personal to her. This was a woman who, on the rare occasion she walked past Trump Tower, would make a sign of the cross — and then joke that she could smell sulfur wafting in the air.[13]
I miss my Uncle Teddy. I miss my Aunt Luisa. I miss a world in which Dalí’s optimism took the form of a fur-lined bathtub hurled through a department store window to land on the sidewalk of Fifth Avenue surrounded by shattered glass. I miss the beauty of Rene Paul Chambellan’s French Modern Style muses watching over us.
When Trump destroyed Bonwit Teller’s monumental art that rightfully belonged to the nation, the New York Times made its position clear: “Evidently, New York needs to make salvation of this kind of landmark mandatory and stop expecting that its developers will be good citizens and good sports.”
As early as 1980, Uncle Teddy and Aunt Luisa knew that Trump, a Philistine American with no loving muses to watch over him, was neither a good citizen nor a good sport.
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[1] See: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-south-dakotas-2020-mount-rushmore-fireworks-celebration-keystone-south-dakota/.
[2] See: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-south-dakotas-2020-mount-rushmore-fireworks-celebration-keystone-south-dakota/.
[3] “Developer Scraps Bonwit Sculptures; Builder Orders Bonwit Art Deco Sculptures Destroyed,” by Robert D. McFadden, New York Times, June 6, 1980.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] “The Store That Slipped Through the Cracks,” by Christopher Gray, New York Times, October 3, 2014.
[7] Harry Hurt III. Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump. Battleboro, VT: Echo Point Books & Media, 1996.
[8] Charlotte Alter, a reporter for Time magazine, covered Trump’s announcement. She noted: “This was the speech where Trump said the thing about Mexicans as rapists. And 40 feet in front of him, behind all the cameras there is a guy from Mexico, almost certainly an undocumented immigrant, scooping ice cream for Trump banana splits, wearing a hat that says Trump ice cream on it.”
[9] The construction of the Stewart & Company 12-story tower required the demolition of five private townhouses William Waldorf Astor built between 1889 and 1898.
[10] To understand the kind of person Chappel was, consider his take, published in the New Yorker magazing on July 12, 1930, on the Chrysler Building: “It is distinctly a stunt design, evolved to make the man in the street look up. To our mind, however, it has no significance as serious design; and even if it is merely advertising architecture, we regret that Mr. Van Alen did not arrange a more subtle and gracious combination for his Pelion-on-Ossa parabolic curves.”
[11] Dalí returned to New York three years later when he mounted a pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair held in Flushing Meadows. His pavilion was “Sueños de Venus,” “Dreams of Venus.” No bathtubs were included.
[12] Of course, as Barneys showed, it’s possible to go too far trying to be a day ahead of tomorrow. The store that Barney Pressman founded became a powerhouse when his son, Fred, took the helm. Then the next generation destroyed what their grandfather had built.
[13] The scent of sulfur, associated with the idiomatic expression “fire and brimstone,” is said to present when Satan is near.
