Be Somebody with a Body

Be Somebody with a Body is associated in the diary with small paintings Andy Warhol distributed to guests at a Christmas Eve dinner. The entry records the works as gifts within a gathering, giving the phrase a specific social setting while leaving its intended meaning and visual treatment undescribed.

The phrase and the paintings

The diary refers to the works as little Be Somebody with a Body paintings. It does not describe their images, materials, or whether the words appeared on the paintings themselves, so the phrase is best understood here as the name attached to the group of works rather than a confirmed inscription.

Christmas Eve gifts

Warhol took a group to Nippon for Christmas Eve dinner and gave out the paintings there. He also recorded the dinner bill as $280. The brief account places the works in an intimate exchange among dinner guests, not in a gallery or a recorded sale; it does not identify the recipients individually or say how many paintings he distributed.

Significance in the diary

The surviving account preserves the phrase through a concrete gesture: small artworks handed out during a holiday meal. That context makes the title part of the evening's social record, but the entry offers no further explanation of the phrase's meaning or of the paintings' later whereabouts.