Chris Evert

Chris Evert enters the diaries through the making and circulation of images: she wanted to be photographed for Andy Warhol’s Athletes series after she and Burt Reynolds had recently been talking about him. Her portrait became a testing ground for a new format, showing how Warhol’s celebrity imagery depended not only on its subjects but also on the choices, negotiations, and reactions surrounding its production.

Identity and Introduction

Evert appears under the familiar name Chrissie in Warhol’s diary, but her role in these passages is not primarily biographical. She is identified as a subject for the Athletes series and as someone who actively sought a session: she told Warhol that she and Burt Reynolds had recently discussed him, which was why she wanted to take part. Her interest places her within the stream of recognizable public figures who came to Warhol not merely to be observed but to have their image made by him.

Warhol prepared for the session by buying a new camera, explaining that he needed it to photograph Evert later that afternoon. He gave her a copy of the Burt Reynolds issue of Interview magazine, bringing the magazine’s celebrity world into the encounter as both a social gesture and a tangible example of the image-making around them.

The Athletes Portrait Session

The diary records an awkward interruption during Evert’s visit. Victor began pulling out Warhol’s Shadow paintings of male sexual anatomy, which Warhol described as works for which the models had posed as “landscapes.” Someone had to tell Victor to stop. The episode sits sharply beside the purpose of Evert’s visit: she was there to be photographed for an athlete series, while the studio’s other work and its unruly social atmosphere intruded on the session.

The broader procedure Warhol used for portraits helps explain the extent to which such an image was constructed. He generally began by taking about sixty Polaroids with a Polaroid Big Shot, selecting four for conversion into positive images, then choosing and cropping one image and cosmetically altering it before it was enlarged for silkscreening. Assistants prepared flesh-toned canvases; Warhol traced the image, painted selected areas, and aligned the finished silkscreen with those colors. Slight misalignments produced the portraits’ characteristic shifting effect. The diaries do not specify each step used for Evert’s image, but the documented method makes clear that a Warhol portrait was the result of selection and transformation, not simply a record of a sitting.

A New Format and Its Reception

By November 1977, Warhol was making a new version of Evert’s portrait in many small pictures rather than the large format a collector expected. Richard Weisman reacted badly when he saw the change and returned to it repeatedly in calls that day. His response shifted after he saw that the Newsweek interviewer at the office loved the new style; he then called again to apologize. The episode records a disagreement not just about Evert’s likeness but about how it should be presented, and how quickly an artistic judgment could change in response to another person’s approval.

Evert’s appearances therefore connect several parts of Warhol’s practice: the athlete as a public figure, the camera session as a social encounter, and the finished image as an object whose format remained open to revision and dispute. Her importance in these passages lies in that intersection. She is both the person who sought out Warhol’s camera and the subject through whom the diaries register a change in his portrait style.