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When Donald Trump Razed the Bonwit Teller Building, He Promised the Met Its Art Deco Friezes. A New Book Details How He Pulverized Them Instead

Read an excerpt from the book 'Art and Crime: The Fight Against Looters, Forgers, and Fraudsters in the High-Stakes Art World.'

Stefan Koldehoff & Tobias Timm, July 5, 2022



Bonwit Teller department store. Photo by George Rinhart/Corbis via Getty Images.

Donald Trump’s relationship to the Metropolitan Museum of Art was permanently damaged early on. He refused to donate artworks that he had promised to the museum and instead had them destroyed, along with a venerable building that had played an important role in American art history.

At that site, the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 56th Street in Manhattan at which Trump constructed his prestige project Trump Tower between 1980 and 1982, the flagship store of the luxury department store chain Bonwit Teller and Co. had earlier stood. The 1929 building was the work of the same architects who had designed Grand Central Terminal, Whitney Warren and Charles Wetmore. It was intended originally to house the women’s department store Stewart. Bonwit Teller, who took over the building in 1930 and opened it anew, soon worked with world-famous artists. Starting in 1936, the Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dalí regularly decorated the windows with spectacular installations, for example in 1939, working with the theme “night and day.” In the 1950s, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg worked for the company on the side as window dressers, using the pseudonym “Matson Jones.” Among other things, Johns displayed his now iconic painting Flag on Orange Field behind a mannequin in the windows in 1957. That same year in the same place, Rauschenberg showed his Red Combine Painting along with others. Two years earlier, the large photographic work Blue Ceiling Matson Jones could be seen in the background of the Bonwit Teller windows.

In 1959, James Rosenquist was also working for the department store. A half century later, he recalled: “By the late 1950s I’d begun to lead a double life. In the daytime I painted billboards and designed display windows for Bonwit Teller, Tiffany’s, and Bloomingdale’s; at night and on weekends I hung out with artists and painted.” In 1961, five large-format paintings by the then almost completely unknown artist Andy Warhol stood and were hung in the windows on Fifth Avenue. Warhol was then earning his living mostly with advertising assignments, starting in 1951 with work for Bonwit Teller display director Gene Moore. At the time, this descendant of Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants was not taken seriously as a painter. Ten years later, Warhol changed his approach, putting his own works in the windows of Bonwit Teller, and his global career took off. Today a museum director would kill for one of these paintings—among them, the now famous Blast with its Superman theme, and Before and After 1 which depicts a nose job. “For more than 50 years, Bonwit Teller had an eye for the New York avant-garde art scene,” as the scholarly publication The Art Story summarized the meaning of this New York art site. “Under Moore’s direction in the midcentury, Bonwit Teller gave many modern artists their start in the world of art and design. With free creative reign, avant-garde artists experimented in the department store window, turning a glass case into an alternative art space, and introducing the public to new and exciting styles.”

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