Düsseldorf is recorded as the setting for a working visit in which Andy Warhol traveled into the surrounding countryside to photograph a German butcher. The entry makes the place significant not through a description of the city itself, but as the starting point for a portrait assignment that brought Warhol’s commercial art practice into contact with a sausage factory, its owner, and the customs of a nearby town.

A dated working visit

The diary dates the trip to Thursday, February 14, 1980, and places it under the heading Düsseldorf. Warhol and his companions took Hans Mayer’s car out of the city to a small country town to photograph a German butcher. The diary does not name that town as Düsseldorf; the heading identifies the larger travel setting while the day’s events unfold elsewhere in the region. The distinction matters: Düsseldorf functions as a point of orientation for a day spent moving between the countryside, a factory, a restaurant, and Mayer’s gallery.

The butcher owned Herta, which Warhol described as one of Germany’s largest sausage companies. The visit was work, but it also became a guided encounter with the owner’s working environment. Warhol noted the building, the visible employees, and the collection of objects and art inside. The diary treats the business not simply as a backdrop for a portrait, but as a place where the owner’s commercial success, personal taste, and public image came together.

A factory furnished with art

The owner had one of Warhol’s Pig works on the wall. Around it, Warhol observed toys, stuffed cows and pigs, other accumulated objects, and art, including pieces suspended from the ceiling that he described as water-dripping paintings. The assortment made the factory setting distinct from a formal gallery: art appeared among the signs of sausage production and the owner’s collection, rather than isolated in a dedicated exhibition space.

The owner told Warhol that he bought art because it helped sell more sausages by making customers happy. That explanation linked cultural display directly to the company’s business. Warhol’s work was not only an object in the owner’s collection; in the owner’s account, art could contribute to the atmosphere in which a product was sold. The diary records this claim alongside Warhol’s observation of the factory and its employees, giving the visit a practical intersection between portraiture, collecting, and commerce.

Warhol and his companions were given white smocks and hats and taken through the production area, where they watched women making sausages. The tour placed the visitors briefly inside the laboring space of the business they had come to photograph. Its industrial routine contrasted with the unusual display of toys and artworks, while the owner’s collection connected the factory back to Warhol’s own professional world.

The portrait within Warhol’s wider practice

After the tour, Warhol and his companions looked through the owner’s portfolio of Picasso prints, including a Picasso print of Paloma Picasso, before making Polaroids for the portrait and having tea. The sequence moved from the owner’s collection to the photographic work that had brought Warhol there. The session was part of the portrait activity that occupied Warhol throughout much of the 1970s and continued to be an important source of income; his general procedure began with Polaroid photographs from which he selected images for later silkscreen production.

The diary confirms that Polaroids were taken in this particular session, but does not say how many were made or describe the subsequent production of the butcher’s portrait. Warhol’s established method elsewhere involved taking approximately sixty photographs with a Polaroid Big Shot, selecting four for positive images on acetate, then choosing, cropping, and cosmetically altering one image before enlarging it for a silkscreen. Assistants prepared canvases with colored backgrounds, and the alignment of the screened image with those painted areas produced the characteristic shifting effect of the finished portraits. This broader practice clarifies the work behind the brief phrase that Polaroids were taken in the countryside without establishing that every step occurred during the Düsseldorf-area visit.

A disrupted meal and a local custom

Hospitality proved uneven. The butcher’s wife came by, but Warhol’s party was not offered lunch. Only later did the owner ask whether they would like to try his hot dogs; they ate two each, one white and one black, with mustard. The owner then went to have lunch in the company lunchroom, while Warhol and his companions left without a meal and drove to a restaurant in Bottrop. The diary presents this small mismatch of expectations as part of the day’s itinerary, rather than as a formal dispute.

In Bottrop, the visitors learned that it was a carnival day when women chased men and cut off their ties. Having seen drunken women moving around, they removed their ties and hid them in their pockets. The precaution did not protect Warhol’s shirt: the women cut off its tail instead. He was angry because it was a good shirt, and later returned to Mayer’s gallery tired and still upset about the damage. The day’s work thus ended not with the portrait sitting alone, but with a change of clothing, a frustrated departure, and a drive back to the gallery.

Düsseldorf as a working itinerary

The diary offers no sustained account of Düsseldorf’s streets, institutions, or history. Its portrait of the place is instead an itinerary of work: a drive from the city to a sausage manufacturer, a photographic session among the owner’s art and industrial surroundings, a stop in Bottrop, and a return to the gallery. That limited viewpoint makes Düsseldorf legible as a node in Warhol’s traveling portrait business, where the camera could carry an established studio practice into settings far removed from the New York office.

The visit also brings several kinds of display into one day. Warhol’s Pig hung in the butcher’s workplace; the owner presented art as a way to make customers happy; and Warhol made Polaroids intended for a portrait. Yet the account remains attentive to the practical interruptions around that exchange: no lunch at the factory, a restaurant in Bottrop, and a shirt cut during carnival. Düsseldorf’s significance in the diary lies in this convergence of commissioned image-making, business, local custom, and ordinary travel, without implying that the city itself is described in detail.