Carly Simon

Carly Simon enters the diary through a portrait commission that became television material: Andy Warhol painted her alongside Larry Rivers and Marisol for an ABC program. Across two April 1980 entries, she is both the subject of an artwork and a participant in the work of presenting that artwork to an audience, with the arrangement’s payment terms and the atmosphere of the sessions recorded in practical detail.

The commission and its terms

On April 10, the crew for ABC’s revived Omnibus came to the office to film a program about Carly Simon having her portrait painted by Andy Warhol, Larry Rivers, and Marisol. Warhol had decided he would not do another project without payment. Vincent Fremont arranged a contract, with Simon paying most of the cost. The commission therefore appears not simply as a sitting but as paid work negotiated before filming began.

A tentative arrival

Simon was too nervous to come upstairs at first, so wine was sent down to the car. Once she came up, she became sociable. The diary notes a small piece of preparation for the camera: she was asked to put on lipstick. After the work, she was hungry, and the office sent for health sandwiches from Brownies, which she liked. Warhol taped the session and recorded two food costs, $8.30 and $23.44, preserving the ordinary logistics alongside the portrait-making.

The portrait as a television subject

On April 24, Warhol, Larry Rivers, and Marisol went to a television studio for the ABC segment, arriving for a 9:00 start. Rivers arrived by limousine and made the director’s instructions into a performance, asking where to stand, what to say, how to look, and what to think. One of his five portraits had a Chinese couple having sex in the background, which the production required him to remove. When the crew then wanted the artists posed before blank easels, listening to Simon, Rivers refused; he considered that staging too corny after he had already accommodated the request to alter the painting. The episode shows the portrait session being reshaped for television, while the artists negotiated how much of that staging they would accept.

Within Warhol’s portrait practice

Simon’s commission belonged to a broader practice that made portraiture a substantial source of Warhol’s income. His usual method began with about sixty Polaroid photographs taken with a Polaroid Big Shot camera. He selected four images for a screen printer, then chose and cropped one, adjusting features such as the neck, nose, lips, and complexion to make the subject appear more attractive. The selected image was enlarged from an 8-by-10-inch acetate to a 40-by-40-inch one for silkscreening. Assistants prepared colored canvas backgrounds in advance; Warhol traced the image onto the canvas, painted areas such as hair and clothing, and aligned the silkscreen over those colors. Slight shifts in alignment produced the portraits’ characteristic layered appearance. The stated standard price was about $25,000 for the first canvas and $5,000 for each additional one; the diary does not specify which of these production steps or prices applied to Simon’s particular portrait.