Andy Warhol's Torso exhibition at Ace Gallery opened in Venice, Los Angeles, in September 1978, turning an exhibition of explicit body imagery into a mass-attended social event. The diary records both the show on September 23 and the enormous crowd the following day: the paintings were presented alongside interviews, free copies of Interview, celebrity guests, and a beachside party.

The exhibition and its publicity

On Saturday, September 23, Wendy Stark drove Warhol to the Ace Gallery for the Torso show. In the hot, dry weather—100 degrees—the exhibition looked good to him. Its paintings depicted genitals and anuses, making the body itself the show’s blunt subject. A thousand copies of Interview were ready to be given away, linking the gallery presentation to the magazine’s promotional reach.

Warhol and Wendy Stark also gave interviews to Connoisseur and Society West. Fred Hughes joked to interviewers that the shaved-vagina image in one painting was Wendy’s. His fabrication made the exhibition’s explicit imagery part of the publicity, while turning Wendy into its subject as well as a participant in promoting the show.

The crowd and the celebration

The next day, after the group went to pick up Ursula Andress, Warhol was pulled through the crowd in Venice. Marisa Berenson wore a gold-sequined beret and jacket with tight black stretch pants; her sister Berry wore a blue-and-white striped cotton dress, while Sue Mengers wore a flowing hot-pink chiffon gown. The diary gives the attendance as 3,500 people. Warhol was hustled into his car and taken quickly to Robert’s, the beachside restaurant where the party was held.

The crowd’s attention repeatedly turned the exhibition’s imagery into live spectacle. A man announced that he had the biggest penis in Los Angeles, and Warhol offered to sign it. Marisa leaned toward the man to look; her hair caught fire from a candle. The abrupt mishap sits beside the event’s deliberate theatricality, compressing its mix of bodily display, celebrity, and danger into one incident.

A public opening as performance

The diary’s two consecutive entries give the opening both a gallery setting and the scale of a public celebration. The first emphasizes the works, the giveaway copies, and interviews; the next records the thousands who came, the crowded passage through Venice, the rapid departure by car, and the party on the beach. The account presents the exhibition not only as a display of paintings but as an occasion organized around visibility—of the art, its guests, and the bodies that became part of its story. Ken Harrison was present but lost in the shuffle, although Sue Mengers was eager to meet him, as were others who knew of his appearance in one of the paintings.