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.
