Ezra Maas

Chapter Three

I is another.169

Andy Warhol was pronounced clinically dead on 3rd June 1968.170 He had been shot. Of the three bullets fired at Warhol, it was the third and final shot that did the worst damage. The .32 calibre slug punched through his right side, piercing his lungs, oesophagus, spleen, liver and stomach, and exited out the left side of his back. He was dead for a minute and a half in the emergency room at Columbus Hospital, New York, until surgeons cut open his chest and massaged his heart back to life. Warhol was in surgery for five and half hours after that, as doctors worked to save him. They were successful, but his injuries were so severe that he had to wear a surgical corset for the rest of his life and never fully recovered.

Valerie Solanas,171 a radical feminist, activist and author, was arrested for Warhol’s attempted murder and later diagnosed with schizophrenia. She famously told police she had done it because Warhol had “too much control over my life”. However, there were also claims that she had fallen under the sway of other charismatic figures on the ’60s art scene who promised to support her work if she carried out the shooting,172 However, this was never proven, and the claims have been highly disputed. Solanas was jailed173 in the aftermath and the carefree, open door policy of The Factory was over. Some felt Pop Art died that day, too. The decade was coming to a violent and nasty end. Many said it began two years earlier, not long after the arrival of a mysterious stranger in the city.

New York wears many faces. In time, Ezra Maas would come to know them all, while never revealing his own. This was the beginning of his second life, just six weeks after disappearing from his home in the UK following his uncle’s fatal overdose. Based in Greenwich Village, he took his first steps towards becoming an artist in February 1966, selling paintings and sketches on a snowy corner of 12th Street and Broadway, outside The Strand174 bookstore. In his previously unpublished paper, Endangered Species: Exodus and Extinction in the work of Ezra Maas 1964 – ’66, Professor Paul Desmond writes:

“…the relocation to the US was also significant for another reason. It signified the death of the boy Ezra. Now only Maas remained, and this was how he referred to himself thereafter, yet another death in his life had preceded rebirth, geographical movement cleared a path for psychological reinvention…”175

While no definitive explanation has ever been given for how he arrived in America, it has been speculated that Maas was aided by twenty-one-year-old heiress Hilary Banford,176 who was the daughter of US steel tycoon Robert Banford. The socialite was a familiar figure on the London art scene and was renowned for spending money almost as fast as her father could make it. According to Hilary’s younger sister, Rosette, the pair first met at the National Gallery in London when Maas was just fifteen. The story goes that Hilary found Maas sitting cross-legged in front of Renoir’s The Umbrellas177 writing a poem inspired by the painting in his notebook. A contradictory (and less romantic) account of his departure from the UK describes Maas, with forged seaman’s papers, bribing his way onto a merchant ship docked at Liverpool and making his way to New York himself. He lived in poverty for weeks and earned a living performing card tricks at Coney Island,178 before a chance meeting with Hilary at Greenwich Village book store The Strand, where he managed to charm his way into her life. Either way, there is little doubt she provided Maas with much needed financial backing, even if their relationship, in a romantic sense at least, only lasted a few months.179 Even at this young age, Maas’s ability to seek out people who could help him was as finely tuned as his art.

Other stories of Maas’s early days living in Greenwich Village describe how he often played chess ‘for quarters’ in Washington Square Park and various Manhattan chess clubs, while struggling to make a living as an artist. There were also rumours that to stay off the streets Maas had earned cash by volunteering for psychedelic drug-testing experiments, which were taking place in a number of college campuses in New York, and elsewhere across the United States, during the 1960s.180 These stories were later linked to accusations181 that Maas’s sudden rise to fame over the next twelve to eighteen months was stage-managed by ‘friends in high places’, as well as controversial allegations which emerged over a decade later implicating the Maas Foundation as conspirators in the CIA-funded Project MK-Ultra.182 This association was strenuously denied and never proven.

Maas was also a lover of independent cinema and reportedly spent his early days in New York educating himself in film, with regular visits to screenings at art houses such as the Thalia on 95th Street, and Dan Talbot’s New Yorker on Broadway between 88th and 89th,183 as well as retrospectives of Hollywood directors at the Museum of Modern Art.184

In order to build his early reputation, Banford encouraged Maas to give away some of his work for free on street corners in and around the East Village,185 and arranged meetings for him with the power players on the New York art scene, including Leo Castelli, Sidney Janis and Julien Levy, which months later would lead to Maas’s first solo exhibitions.

It was during this period, working out of a small studio space in the East Village owned by Banford, that Maas began to gather a following. People would crowd around the artist on 12th Street as he handed out artwork until the police told them to move along, causing fans and followers to congregate outside his studio.186 Many were invited inside to watch Maas at work or engage in energetic conversations about art until the early hours. One onlooker said:

“Maas could walk into a room and every head would turn…it was like he was the sun itself…he was this radiant child, and everyone gravitated towards him…it was incredible.”187

Within weeks, these informal gatherings had moved to small venues, often spaces above cafes and coffee shops, and were formalised into live ‘happenings’.188 These events, organised by Maas’s followers rather than the artist himself, usually featured the launch of a new artwork as the centrepiece, but also included performance art, mixed media, music, film, photography, dance, and public interventions. They were part exhibition, part social gathering. Loosely modelled after German ‘Fluxus’189 activities, these happenings began to attract greater and greater crowds, but Maas himself never attended. While early descriptions of Maas cast him as a charismatic street artist, he also had a reputation for being intensely private outside of his inner circle. A collection of his early artworks, brought together with his own text, was released in May 1966 as a unique, illustrated novella entitled XXXXXX.190 This was the next step toward widespread fame and his work becoming synonymous with the counterculture and the social unrest across the US. XXXXXX was initially distributed guerrilla-style on A4 paper, typewritten and bound in yellow with an image of a Borromean Knot191 stencilled on the front cover in red. Copies were passed around in cafés, bars, coffee houses,192 schools, and colleges and it became the de rigueur193 fashion accessory for the city’s disaffected youth. Thanks to Banford’s connections, XXXXXX was picked up by Greenwich Village small press Sun & Co, who distributed the book on a wider scale. Within weeks, Maas’s ‘micro-cult’ of followers had grown to include a number of hard-core devotees, who treated the book like an underground manifesto, filled with esoteric messages written just for them.194 Critics were also enthralled, hailing XXXXXX as “a profound meditation of the postmodern condition”,195 although at least one reporter said they did not believe the book had been written by a teenager and accused Maas of plagiarising a number of other texts.

Despite this, XXXXXX became a defining publication for alienated and disaffected teens in late 1960s New York and continues to sell 50,000 copies-a-year196 in the city to this day. The success of the book led to Maas publishing several short stories in The New Yorker and elsewhere, using a variety of thinly veiled pseudonyms. His artwork also brought him to the attention of other New York based artists, notably Andy Warhol, who was a regular in nightspots such as Max’s Kansas City197 which Maas and his followers were also known to frequent. Julia Deeley, a model and singer-songwriter, was a friend of Warhol and claims to have known Maas briefly:

“Maas was a regular visitor to The Factory198 in the early days. Andy was infatuated with him. He referred to Maas as “that beautiful boy” and the brightest of all “superstars”.199 Maas wasn’t interested in Andy in the same way and he certainly didn’t want to be one of Andy’s superstars, but there was respect there from artist to artist, and he always said he learned a lot from him…he attended Warhol’s solo show at the Castelli Gallery later that year when Andy redecorated the space with Cow Wallpaper…Maas seemed particularly interested in what Andy was doing with film…I got the sense that he was absorbing everything he could from those early interactions with a view to pushing the medium further…Maas was clearly ambitious. He stopped coming by The Factory after a while and became one of those artists who were talked about a lot, but you rarely saw them…I heard a rumour he was agoraphobic, but I don’t know if that’s true…”200

It has been speculated that Maas, following Warhol’s example, began recording his telephone conversations and keeping all of his personal correspondence to be used as potential ‘art’. Maas was also rumoured to have been impressed with Warhol’s use of assistants to increase his productivity201 although he disagreed with turning art into a factory production line. Instead he saw the use of assistants as a way for him to distance himself from the press and fans alike, retreating from public view to concentrate on his art, while his followers dealt with the media and helped manage his business interests.

In many ways, this can be seen as the early origins of The Maas Foundation, although it would not formally take shape, and be named as such, until Maas’s marriage to Helena Huston in 1980. Even at this relatively young age Maas was gaining followers, and supposedly had a wide circle of friends in the art world, but he was also determined to remain inaccessible to the media. He refused interviews and public engagements, something he would continue to do throughout his life, and told friends wildly differing stories about his life and background. The fashion photographer, John Jones-Parker, became friends with Maas in early 1967:

“Before I met him, they told me he was doing LSD, peyote, heroin, the whole lot…” Parker recalls. “But when I met him I didn’t see signs of drug use whatsoever…in fact, while everyone else was high, it was pretty obvious he was clean…what did become apparent was the lies he would tell about himself at every opportunity, and he had others lying for him too…before long no one knew what was real and what was fiction…maybe not even him…the rumours of drug use and addiction…I wouldn’t be surprised if he started those stories himself. It added to the image he was trying to cultivate…”202

Maas consolidated his growing success with a number of solo shows at the 10th Street co-op galleries, including Brata, Hansa, and Tanager.203 He also exhibited at Virginia Dwan’s New York Gallery on 57th Street, which had opened the previous year in 1965. Dwan,204 a dark-haired, glamorous and wealthy art collector, patron, and philanthropist, was notable for her interest in male artists (who became known as Dwan’s boys) and was an advocate of Minimalism, Conceptual, and Land art. Maas was becoming an established name, but he would never be part of the establishment. Even as his shows continued to grow in size he retained his radical nature and the respect of other avant-garde artists. As feminist performance artist Eva D recalls:

 “There was no jealousy among us. We didn’t say “Oh, now he’s famous. He’s sold out.” It wasn’t like that. We would talk about the implications of what Maas was doing, using the gallery space in a way that had never been done before; his work was fucking unreal. It pushed the boundaries. We all left thinking, “What does that mean?” and “What can I do to keep pace with this when I get back to my studio?” That’s what was happening.”205

It was also at this time that a number of spiritual and religious organisations reached out to Maas. Every week another group claimed he had converted to their belief system, but while Maas chose to remain publicly silent on the matter his friends stated he had no affiliation with any organisation, spiritual or otherwise, and that he was generally opposed to organised religion. However, due to Maas’s continued reluctance to comment publicly about these stories, the rumours continued to grow. Joan Lauder, author of A Decade of Counterculture, was one of those who believed this was a very clever move by Maas:

“This was another example of Maas allowing rumours of his association with cults and pseudo-religions to flourish, for the very reason that if people were talking about all these bizarre theories then no one knew what he was actually doing…And whether he was behind it all or not, it was incredibly clever PR…”206

Although attempts were made to link him with everything from occultism207 and ceremonial magic to Christian science, acupuncture, homeopathy, macrobiotics, and dianetics,208 Maas was arguably most closely associated with Zen Buddhism and Hinduism during these months, with one group asserting he had been a follower of The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna for several years, while others claimed he had travelled to Bombay with a girlfriend on a pilgrimage to visit a number of gurus and holy places. Representatives of self-realisation gurus Mahavatar Babaji, Lahiri Mahasaya, and Sri Yukteswar, all claimed to have spoken with Maas. Throughout all of this, Maas himself remained silent.

As ever, he chose to let his work speak for him. In late 1967 Maas staged his most ambitious show yet, transforming a townhouse owned by Banford into a ‘living museum’ filled with over fifteen rooms of art including paintings, sculptures, live performance art, audio, and video installation. It was a colossal happening, which continued 24/7 for two weeks, with artists living, eating, and sleeping in a self-contained world where visitors became part of fluid, live artworks. Work included found objects and materials covered with drawings and words, assemblage art, leftover theatrical backdrops transformed into canvasses, and sculptures made of cardboard and newspaper, plaster and melted lead. Critics were astounded. Jacob Friedkin, for Art Forum magazine, said this in his review of the show:

“It has clearly been created by an artist for whom the act of creation is fundamental to their existence…the result is a mind-bending journey through a mansion of the arts…painting, sculpture, performance, film, photography, sound, and an extraordinary range of other media…each room is themed and draws you through to the next as in a narrative. There are rooms within rooms, worlds within worlds…it has reimagined how we engage with artwork…”209

Following the success of his solo show Maas’s fame was near its peak. Invitations to exhibit work at the Venice Biennale,210 and Documenta IV211 in Kassel, Germany, followed, but Maas was reportedly reluctant. Renowned Land artist Jack Gregson commented two years later that Maas had almost a prophetic quality to his decision-making: “If you remember, both the Venice Biennale and Documenta IV were dogged by the student protests of ’68 and fierce criticism over the paucity of female and non-white artists…As usual, Maas’s instincts were proved right…”

Eager to escape the instant and claustrophobic fame his early artworks had brought him, Maas allegedly packed a bag one night in late summer and threatened to leave New York, with plans to work his way across the country to the West Coast. His reasons were the subject of much speculation. Blue Box gallery212 owner Max Howard said:

“He described fame as an unmanageable surge, and confessed to feeling uncomfortable with the attention it brought him…he may not have been ready to return to Europe, but he wanted a return to anonymity, he felt it was essential to his work…”213

However, there were other rumours. A friend of Maas had allegedly been brutally beaten by members of the cult that had developed around XXXXXX. Maas strongly denied accusations that he had been behind the attack.214 This was followed by reports of vandalism in the Greenwich Village area, with quotes by Maas appearing as graffiti in various locations, including several Rockwell taxicabs,215 and even on the side of an NYPD police cruiser. This cult was allegedly growing at such a rate that it had already begun to divide into different, rival, factions with alternate interpretations of Maas’s work. It was not only XXXXXX which inspired such devotion either. His paintings, sculptures, and other works were all being analysed by fans for hidden messages and meanings, leading at least one journalist to describe the phenomenon as “bordering on religious extremism”.216 Another accused Maas of a “terrifying narcissism”217 and accused him of intentionally radicalising “impressionable and susceptible individuals who were seeking purpose”218 with promises that prolonged study of his art could fundamentally alter consciousness. Right-wing columnist Grace McMahon wrote:

“Maas may be a talented artist, but this young man is also charismatic and dangerous…anyone who believes this cult was born in a spontaneous ‘big bang’ without his involvement is a fool…and if you seriously think that anyone other than Maas is pulling the strings of all these groups, then you are as weak-willed as his followers…”219

While Maas never spoke publicly about the existence of a cult the consensus among the mainstream press was that these groups had emerged and evolved without his guidance or explicit direction, but this did little to prevent speculation that he was ultimately behind their creation and that they were carrying out his instructions. The activity of these rogue factions became increasingly violent and anarchic. The British painter Howard Hewlett, a friend of Maas, claimed a shooting in Queens where two people were wounded was the work of one of these groups, and that this escalation was one of the direct catalysts for Maas’s decision to leave the East Coast: “The shooting was a sign…things were out of control…and it was no coincidence that Maas left New York a couple of weeks later…he wanted to distance himself from this madness. America was changing.”220 Warhol superstar Ultra Violet echoed this sentiment in 1968 when she said: “Violence is everywhere in the air today.”221

However, Hewlett’s testimony stands in direct contrast to claims from an alleged former member of The Maas Foundation, who wished to remain anonymous222:

“Maas was behind it all…the guerrilla artwork and stunts, the graffiti, the subversive, anti-establishment messages, the beatings, the shootings, and worse…. he would hold crazed meetings in his studio…where he would sometimes just erupt, screaming at everyone, raving about his enemies, about other artists…there would always be a couple of handguns, loaded, on the table as he paced around and there were drugs everywhere…he was definitely on something…he could be violent and unpredictable one minute, then cool and calculated the next, almost reptilian…he had one of his friends nearly beaten to death because they sold a photograph of him to a reporter, and I heard someone ended up getting shot to get it back.”

He added that at the same time, Maas was loved and worshipped by the majority of his followers despite this behaviour: “It was seen as part of his genius, this brutal, unrelenting drive. It could be harrowing being around him, but we loved and feared him in equal measure. We believed it when he told us we would change the world.”

This same unnamed source also goes on to offer an alternate take on why Maas planned to leave New York that year: “Maas didn’t run from what was happening on the East Coast, he left because his work was done. He travelled across the country to continue recruiting followers and start up new chapters. It wasn’t about the fear of escalation, it was a desire for expansion…The birth of the Maas Foundation was no Immaculate Conception, it was all him…his will…New York was just the beginning, Los Angeles was next.”223

If this source can be believed, the City of Angels was about to be visited by the Devil himself.

END

Notes

169. Arthur Rimbaud (1851 – 1891)

170. The year 1968 saw unprecedented outbreaks of violence and social unrest across the United States and around the world, including the student protests of that year, marches for Civil Rights, anti-Vietnam demonstrations, and the assassinations of Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy and Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

171. Solanas was the author of the radical feminist SCUM manifesto, a scathing critique of patriarchal society which was published in 1967. She had moved to New York as a writer and met Warhol at the Factory, acting in one of his films.

172. Unnamed sources have linked Solanas with several extreme groups, including friends and followers of Ezra Maas. However, there is no evidence to suggest she ever met Maas himself or had any communication with him. In fact, Maas was not in New York at the time of the shooting. His whereabouts that summer are a source of speculation, with conflicting stories placing him in LA and back in the UK.

173. Solanas was initially judged unfit to stand trial after being diagnosed with chronic paranoid schizophrenia. She was eventually tried and sentenced to three years, but was released after one year. Solanas continued to stalk Warhol with threatening phone calls in later life, before disappearing and spending many years homeless, before dying at the age of fifty-two.

174. A fiercely independent family business, The Strand Book Store opened in 1927 on Fourth Avenue, New York, which was known as ‘Book Row’, before moving to Greenwich Village; it reportedly stocked eighteen miles of books on its premises by the late 1960s. Maas’s novella, To Beg or Borrow, had its unofficial launch at the store in March 1966.

175. Desmond, Paul. Endangered Species: Exodus and Extinction in the work of Ezra Maas 1964 – ’66. pp.42-43. The original publication of this research paper was blocked by The Maas Foundation in 1989. A copy was posted to Daniel in 2012.

176. Banford (1944 – 1991) was often compared to Virginia Dwan, another heiress turned art collector and patron.

177. Pierre-Auguste Renoir began The Umbrellas in 1881 and finished it in 1885 – ’86.

178. According to Daniel’s notes on this period, Maas was taken under the wing of Coney Island magician, Fabulous Francis aka Bill Doyle and his wife Ada, who taught him sleight of hand tricks and other techniques. Daniel travelled to New York in 2011 with the hope of tracking down some of the carnival folk who Maas worked alongside, perhaps even Francis himself. However, the old magician was said to have died in the 1980s. For more on this see Daniel’s chapter in New York – Anonymous.

179. It is understood that Ms Banford, later Adler, remained one of Maas’s many financial benefactors for several decades.

180. From the late 1940s to the early 1970s, the CIA secretly conducted a large number of high-dose psychedelic drug experiments at universities, hospitals, and prisons across the US and Canada. This was Project MK-Ultra. It was officially approved by CIA Director Allan Dulles in 1953, ostensibly motivated by fears that Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean agents were using mind control, brainwashing, and experimental drugs to ‘turn’ US soldiers. The project’s principle aim was to control human behaviour using drugs and other psychological techniques so as to give the US an edge in covert operations and during the interrogation of prisoners at the height of the Cold War. However, there have been suggestions that MK-Ultra’s origins can be linked to Operation Paperclip, which saw high-ranking Nazi scientists recruited by the US after WW2, and also Operation Bluebird, which allegedly involved using amphetamines and barbiturates to hypnotise enemy agents into undertaking activity against their will. Between 1953 and 1964, MK-Ultra covertly funded more than 150 human experiments involving psychedelic drugs, paralytics, and electroshock therapy. The drug studies were often conducted at universities, hospitals, or prisons in the US and Canada. Sometimes those volunteering were aware they were testing drugs, but on many other occasions dangerous hallucinogens and psychedelics were administered to individuals without their knowledge or consent. These illegal experiments have been linked with a number of deaths, as well as extreme, anti-social behaviour, acts of violence, and psychological problems later in life. Well-known MK-Ultra tests subjects allegedly include the author Ken Kesey, the gangster James ‘Whitey’ Bulger, and the ‘Unabomber’ Ted Kaczynski – a mathematics prodigy turned domestic terrorist who killed three people and injured twenty-three others in a nationwide bombing campaign. The project was officially terminated in 1973 and most of the documentation relating to the tests was destroyed.

181. It must be noted that many of these accusations came from Maas’s rivals in the art world, who were understandably resentful of his rise to fame – Anonymous.

182. The public only became aware of Project MK-Ultra in the late 1970s. This was due to the work of a number of individuals, including former CIA officer John Marks, who recovered a number of MK-Ultra files using a Freedom of Information Act request. His analysis of these files became the basis for his 1979 book, In Search of the Manchurian Candidate, which is partly responsible for bringing the project to the public’s attention.

183. This was the Golden Age of postwar European and Japanese cinema. Maas reportedly admired the work of directors such as Fellini, Antonioni and Kurosawa, as well as the work of the French New Wave.

184. Programmed in the early ’60s by a young Peter Bogdanovich, who would go on to direct The Last Picture Show among other films.

185. As documented by Art International Magazine Vol. 14, Issue 4. Spring 1970.

186. Allegedly sleeping in stairwells and in the alleyway outside for a chance to meet him, or see some of his work in progress.

187. From one of Daniel’s New York interviews 2011 – ’12.

188. The term ‘Happening’ was first coined by Allan Kaprow. Maas can be seen as following in the footsteps of Kaprow, Claes Oldenberg, Red Grooms and others.

Kaprow said: “Words, sounds, human beings in motion, painted constructions, electric lights, movies and slides – and perhaps in the future, smells – all in continuous space involving the spectator or audience; those are the ingredients. Several or all of them may be used in combination at any one time, which permits me a great range of possibilities.”

189. The Latin word Fluxus means flowing, in English a flux is a flowing out. Fluxus founder Maciunas said that the purpose of Fluxus was to “promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art, promote living art, anti-art”. This has strong echoes of Dada, the early 20th century art movement.

190. Allegedly written when Maas was fifteen, and taken to the US as one of his few belongings when he left England.

191. The Borromean Knot is a group of three rings linked in such a way that if any one of them is cut, all three become separated. French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan used the Borromean knot as a way of illustrating the interdependence of the three orders of the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary. This corresponds to a rethinking of the relationship between language and the body in the subject.

192. Such as Caffè Reggio, the Commons, Caffè Dante in Greenwich Village.

193. Roughly translates from French as ‘out of strict etiquette’ and is used to denote something that is done strictly because it is fashionable.

194. XXXXXX was reportedly influenced by Max Ernst’s collage novels, Une semaine de bonté (1933) and also experimented with techniques such as decalcomania to reveal hidden textures, messages and forms.

195. Greenwich Review, March 1966.

196. Note to reader: I’m not sure where Daniel got these figures. The book is currently out of print and has been for decades, it would appear. The rights are held by The Maas Foundation – Anonymous.

197. The famous nightclub and restaurant at 213 Park Avenue South, New York City, described by critics as both “viper pit and arcadia” and the site of many cultural and sexual unions.

198. At the time, The Factory was located on East 47th Street in Midtown Manhattan.

199. Warhol’s Superstars were a clique of New York personalities – artists, drug addicts, socialites, sex workers and more – who came to be associated with the artist, including Edie Sedgwick, Ultra Violet, Nico, and International Velvet.

200. This is taken from an interview Daniel carried out with Julie in New York in early 2012.

201. Warhol also did this to emphasize his view that art could not escape being treated as a commodity.

202. An excerpt from a full interview conducted with Parker by Daniel in 2012.

203. My own research has revealed that these three galleries had all closed by the mid-1960s. It is unlikely Daniel’s research was incorrect as he was notoriously thorough, but it does raise the possibility that some of the people he interviewed about this period were either lying to him or giving him false information – Anonymous.

204. Dwan was heiress to the Minnesota Mining Company, which had annual sales of $30bn in the 1960s and 1970s.

205. From an interview with Daniel in 2012.

206. In A Decade of Counterculture, Oxford Press, 1985.

207. Maas’s name was mentioned alongside the likes of Aleister ‘The Great Beast’ Crowley and Edgar ‘The Sleeping Prophet’ Cayce.

208. L. Ron Hubbard reportedly sent Maas a telex from his fleet of Sea Org vessels while in the Greek islands, personally inviting the artist to join him. Maas did not respond.

209. Art Forum Vol 11, Issue 15, Fall 1967.

210. One of the world’s biggest art festivals, in Venice, Italy.

211. Documenta is a major international exhibition of contemporary art which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. It was founded by artist, teacher, and curator, Arnold Bode.

212. One of the independent artist-run galleries on 10th Street, New York.

213. Taken from an audio transcript of an interview by Daniel.

214. Although there is no evidence of him ever speaking publicly about the incident.

215. In 1967, New York City ordered all ‘medallion taxis’ be painted yellow to help cut down on unofficial drivers and make official taxicabs more readily recognizable. The wife of the president of New Departure, Nettie Rockwell, particularly liked the colour yellow and it therefore became the colour of the new Rockwell taxicabs. The Rockwell Service Cab became the Yellow Taxicab when Mrs. Rockwell selected that as her choice of colour for the auto.

216. New York Insight, Issue 27, October 1967.

217. Manhattan Monthly Insider, Vol. 3, November 1967.

218. New York Insight, Issue 27, October 1967.

219. McMahon Speaks… January 1968 Edition.

220. From Daniel’s interview with Hewlett.

221. As quoted by Time Magazine, June 1968.

222. The following is an excerpt from interviews conducted by Daniel with an ex-member of The Maas Foundation, in 2012.

223. This interview took place while Daniel was in New York in 2011.