At the World Fair in 1964, based in New York, the pop artist Andy Warhol was one of 8 contemporary artists given a commission by the architect of the New York State Pavillion, Philip Johnson, to fill the spaces on the outside of the main building. Shown above is a photograph of Andy Warhol’s presentation to the American public and the world. It was titled Thirteen Most Wanted Men.

That it caused a shock is an understatement.

The 20 ft. by 20 ft. mural, consisting of large-scale portraits of wanted criminals which were copies of images from a booklet published on 1st February 1962, by the New York Police Department. Government officials quickly objected to the images and on 16 April — two weeks before the fair was due to open — Philip Johnson told Warhol that he must remove or replace the work within 24 hours. The stated reason was that the Governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, was concerned that the images — mostly depicting men of Italian descent — would be insulting to an important segment of his electorate.

On 17th April Warhol gave his permission for it to be painted over, and it was adulterated with aluminum house paint before the fair opened to the public. Many art critics have seen this subsequent monochrome silver 20 feet (6.1 m) square painted over the mural, as a separate artwork. I am inclined to agree. But the original still stands as one of the most subversive comments on The American Dream and by inference American society. Period.

That it was deliberately designed to be provocative and undermine the American Dream — on full glorious unmediated display in its consumerized iteration at the World Fair — is my contention. I see Warhol here in 1964 beginning his first major public subversion of the make-believe America by showing the darker side, the real side to that world. Without the dark, there can of course be no light. And Warhol stands right in the middle and shows us both. It is interesting that his silkscreen printing technique does allow quite naturally and almost effortlessly for such a subversion of the light and the dark.

The real consequences of pursuing and wanting The American Dream is on display in an endless repetition of iconic faces and iconic products. Warhol was the post-war version of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Warhol’s medium was art and as it subsequently became defined, ‘pop-art’. A horrible term but perhaps a necessary one. For it makes the art produced sound rather disposable and cheap but it was in fact — which is, of course, part of the irony of both Warhol and his art — the complete opposite of this.

The subversion begins with the year, 1962, in which Warhol developed his pioneering silkscreen technique to create and produce Green Coca Cola Bottles. A mechanical process that paralleled his use of mass culture subjects. Here, the image of a single Coca-Cola bottle is repeated in regular rows, seven high by sixteen across, above the company’s logo.

The repetitive imagery and standardized format evoke the look of mechanical reproduction yet there are subtle differences in this pattern that accentuate the visual dissonance and increase the hyperreality of this constructed repetitive image. Warhol is cleverly usurping both the advertising of products of consumption and the very images that are used to create the want and the desire for these must-have brands in post-war American society. As he explained,

“A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.”

But of course, more money gets you more, which is The American Dream in one line. So Warhol produced more. More of the same image of Campbells Soup, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and of course those 13 Most Wanted Men in 1964.

And that, in a nutshell, is American consumerism which underpins American Capitalism in a vicious cycle of co-dependence. And that's where those Wanted Men come in. And F Scott Fitzgerald. And to slightly rephrase Shakespeare,

“Some are born into money, some have money thrust upon them, and some achieve, having plenty of money”

We know those who are born into riches and inherit their wealth, the aristocracy or the elites, and we know of those who have money thrown at them, the celebrities and actors and pop-artists of the day, but we rarely hear of those who achieve plenty of money by robbing banks or committing armed robbery or through criminality because that's the darker side of the Dream. Not the nightmare, but the much darker and more realistic part of the Dream.The part — the real part — that needs to be repressed. Warhol repressed nothing in 1964. He let it out in full view. Full-on artistic subversion. Duchamp was completely outgunned and outmaneuvered.

But of course, all of these wealthy monied Americans make up The American Dream. Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby about them and about their downfall and Warhol put a mural up at the World Fair in New York because he knew what that dream was made of and nothing had changed in American society.

And then he obliged those who didn't get the mural by censoring its message because such things only spoil the great American 20th-century long party after conquering Nazism and Japanese colonial aggression. Yet a President had been assassinated and a Cold War initiated and a war in Vietnam would almost destroy America.

So, he covered the mural in aluminum paint and made a very basic but very large ‘silver screen’. This is in (pop)ular usage a metonym for the cinema industry. Americans do not want to see what is really happening to their society; they want Hollywood. And they want The American Dream. Both are false and are nothing but manufactured images and manufactured products.

Warhol provided both and revealed within his reproductive artwork the manufactured lie within the American Dream. His subversion was subtle but it was most definitely there, time and time and time again. But nowhere was it more openly displayed than in the mural of 13 Most Wanted Men of 1964. That the homoerotic connotations of the mural in a still heterosexual dominant society were embedded in the context is another aspect of its subversion. Subversion with such irony. Maybe this is what Rockefeller really objected to and not that the mural would upset the people who bankrolled his political ambitions.