Dorothy Podber
Encyclopedia
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
performance artist.
Born in the Bronx
The Bronx
The Bronx is the northernmost of the five boroughs of New York City. It is also known as Bronx County, the last of the 62 counties of New York State to be incorporated...
to a mother who had tried repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, to abort her, and to a father who worked for the Jewish mobster Dutch Schultz
Dutch Schultz
Dutch Schultz was a New York City-area Jewish American gangster of the 1920s and 1930s who made his fortune in organized crime-related activities such as bootlegging alcohol and the numbers racket...
, Podber was later remembered as a disruptive influence by classmates from West Walton High School.
A wild child of the New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
art scene in the 1950s and 1960s, she helped to run the Nonagon Gallery, which showed the work of a young Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono
is a Japanese artist, musician, author and peace activist, known for her work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking as well as her marriage to John Lennon...
and was known for jazz concerts by such performers as Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus Jr. was an American jazz musician, composer, bandleader, and civil rights activist.Mingus's compositions retained the hot and soulful feel of hard bop and drew heavily from black gospel music while sometimes drawing on elements of Third stream, free jazz, and classical music...
. However, her greatest fame—and notoriety—came from her work as a muse and collaborator with more prominent artists. On one occasion, she turned up at Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol
Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...
's studio and put a bullet through a stack of his silk-screen paintings of Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe was an American actress, singer, model and showgirl who became a major sex symbol, starring in a number of commercially successful motion pictures during the 1950s....
, after which she was banned from the studio. These four paintings, thereafter, were called The Shot Marilyns
Shot Marilyns
The Shot Marilyns is a work of art produced in 1964 by Andy Warhol. It consists of four canvases, each a square measuring 40 inches and each consisting of a painting of a Marilyn Monroe, each shot through in the forehead by a single bullet....
. Podber revelled in her bad-girl reputation. In an interview in 2006, she said:
"I've been bad all my life. Playing dirty tricks on people is my specialty."In the art world, she served mostly as a muse and a co-conspirator of more prominent artists like Ray Johnson
Ray Johnson
Raymond Edward Johnson , known primarily as a collagist and correspondence artist, was a seminal figure in the history of Neo-Dada and early Pop art...
, with whom she staged impromptu happenings on Manhattan streets.
When funds were low, she found unorthodox ways of making money, engaging in businesses as diverse as dispatching maids to doctors' offices in an attempt to gain access to their drug cabinets, and running an illegal abortion referral service. She did paperwork for B'nai Brith long enough to pick their safe and use its contents on her own check-counterfeiting machine. Her attitude to these enterprises bordered on indifference. "I never worked much," she reputedly said.
She was married three times, and had numerous casual liaisons. Her last husband was Lester Schwartz, a bisexual, who had a long-term relationship with actor/director Julian Beck
Julian Beck
Julian Beck was an American actor, director, poet, and painter.-Early life:Beck was born in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan in New York City, the son of Mabel Lucille , a teacher, and Irving Beck, a businessman. He briefly attended Yale University, but dropped out to pursue writing and...
. Schwartz died in 1986. Podber cited bisexuality as something she and Schwartz had in common. One boyfriend was a banker with whom she would have sexual intercourse only on the banknote-strewn floor of his firm's vault. She had no children by any of her partners. She died in her Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
apartment on February 9, 2008, from natural causes, aged 75.
Sources
- Livingstone, Marco (ed.), Pop Art: An International Perspective, The Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1991, ISBN 0-8478-1475-0
- Stokstad, Marilyn, Art History, 1995, Prentice Hall, Inc., and Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, ISBN 0-81091960-5
- Vogel, Carol (1998). The New York Times: INSIDE ART; Perhaps Shot, Perhaps Not. Retrieved January 4, 2008.
- Warhol, Andy and Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol Sixties, Harcourt Books, 1980, ISBN 0-15-672960-1
- Watson, Steven, Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties, Pantheon Books, 2003.