The attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II reaches Andy Warhol not as a scene he witnesses, but as breaking news on a television during a portrait appointment. On May 13, 1981, the report provokes an immediate outburst: Warhol remembers losing a portrait commission when Ronald Reagan was shot and insists that the television be turned off. In the diary, the pope’s shooting becomes a sharp collision between public violence and the routines of portrait work.

The News Interrupts a Portrait Appointment

Warhol had lunch arranged with Charlie Cowles and Sid and Anne Bass. When he arrived, the group was gathered around the television, watching news that the pope had been shot. The diary records no further details about the attack or the pope’s condition; its focus is the scene in the room and Warhol’s response to it.

The interruption lands in the midst of business. After the news, the Basses came to look at their portraits, and Warhol noted that he needed to change some lips and make a number of new portraits. The transition from a shooting on television to adjustments on commissioned images is abrupt, placing the crisis beside the ongoing labor of making faces presentable.

Warhol’s Reaction and the Reagan Comparison

Warhol says he started screaming and recalls a previous portrait commission lost on the day Reagan was shot. He demands that the television be turned off, explaining that he does not want the same loss to happen again. His reaction connects the pope’s attempted assassination with a practical consequence he already associates with a shooting: a portrait opportunity disappearing amid public alarm.

The comparison does not make the two shootings equivalent in scale or outcome. Instead, it shows the channel through which Warhol processes the news in this diary entry: a political shock is registered through its interruption of work and its resemblance to an earlier disruption. The portrait, usually a steady source of commissions, becomes the measure of what the day’s violence might take away.

Work, Publicity, and the Diary’s Frame

Warhol’s portrait business depended on an established production routine. A sitting began with roughly sixty Polaroid photographs; he selected images, chose and cosmetically adjusted a crop, and had the image transferred through acetate and silkscreen onto canvas. The diary’s account of the Bass appointment is much less procedural: it records the need to alter lips and produce more portraits, while the television draws attention away from the work itself.

The account comes from a weekday morning diary call, a format in which Pat Hackett recorded Warhol’s recollections and expenses after the previous day’s events. That routine joined personal narrative to business accounting, and the entry preserves both registers: the alarm of hearing that the pope had been shot and the practical note that the Basses came to view portraits. The attempted assassination appears as a brief but consequential interruption, remembered through the work it threatened to displace.