Jack Nicklaus

Jack Nicklaus enters the diaries through a commissioned portrait sitting in Columbus, where the practical work of making an image became a negotiation over what that image should say. His unease with the session, and his final choice of a photograph he considered flattering, give the brief encounter its defining tension: the famous golfer was not simply being photographed but trying to understand and shape how he would appear in Warhol’s art.

Commission and Context

In September 1977, Richard Weisman told Andy Warhol that he had to travel to Columbus to photograph Nicklaus. Weisman and Fred Hughes were organizing a series of sports-star portraits that Weisman had commissioned. Their plans included an exhibition of ten portraits in December; Warhol thought January would be a better time for it. The assignment belonged to a wider business in which commissioned portraits helped sustain Warhol’s income and brought public figures and private clients into his studio orbit.

The setting was unusual for Warhol’s portrait practice: rather than having Nicklaus pose in the studio, Warhol and Weisman went to a motel Nicklaus owned after checking into another motel. On the plane, Weisman had told Warhol that Vitas Gerulaitis had recently been to Columbus and identified a motel and women to call. That detail belongs to the trip’s social background, not to Nicklaus’s role in the portrait session, which became a self-contained and increasingly strained encounter.

The Columbus Sitting

Nicklaus was friendly, but he did not seem to understand why Warhol and Weisman had come to photograph him. Weisman had sent him a book showing Warhol’s paintings, yet Nicklaus still did not grasp the style. Warhol’s photographs of other athletes—including Tom Seaver, Muhammad Ali, and Pelé—were shown to him, but the examples did not resolve the confusion. The camera and the intended artwork were present, while the purpose of the visit remained unclear to its subject.

The photographs themselves were difficult to make. Warhol found that Nicklaus’s suntan made the images come out too red, and repeated attempts failed to satisfy either the photographer or the sitter. Nicklaus had another phone call, Warhol took more pictures, and the discomfort grew. At last Nicklaus chose a straightforward front-facing shot. He did not want to look cocky, and felt this particular photograph made him look like a nice person. The selection gave him a say in the public image being made, even as Warhol saw little difference between it and the other pictures.

The session also records a small, telling practical problem: there were no golf clubs nearby while Warhol was taking the pictures. Nicklaus went around to offices asking for clubs, then returned with some he said were like his own. Warhol noticed the drawstrings on the hats covering the clubs, an unfamiliar detail amid the effort to stage an image that would read as recognizably Nicklaus.

Portraiture as a Made Image

Warhol’s commissioned portraits followed a carefully organized process. He typically began by taking about sixty Polaroids with a Polaroid Big Shot, selecting a few images for conversion into acetates, then choosing and cropping one image and retouching it to make the sitter appear more attractive. He might lengthen a neck, trim a nose, enlarge lips, or clear the complexion before the image was enlarged for screen printing. The account of Nicklaus’s sitting does not establish which photograph, if any, became the finished portrait; it does show the first stage of a practice in which the subject’s own preferences met the artist’s selection and alteration.

Assistants prepared canvases in advance, using different flesh-tone backgrounds for men’s and women’s portraits. Warhol transferred the image, painted selected areas such as hair, eyes, ties, and jackets, and aligned the silkscreen with those colors. Small shifts between the screened photograph and painted areas gave the portraits their characteristic unsettled appearance. A commission typically cost about $25,000 for the first canvas and $5,000 for each additional one. In this system, a photographic sitting was both a personal encounter and the beginning of a reproducible, costly artwork.

A Brief Encounter, and Its Afterimage

After leaving, Warhol and Weisman discussed the visit in the car. Only then did Warhol consider that Nicklaus might have seemed lonely and wonder whether they should have invited him out. Nicklaus had not suggested it, and no one knew what to do, so the possibility passed without action. The moment does not alter the professional terms of the meeting, but it gives the episode a quieter ending: the awkwardness of the portrait session is followed by Warhol’s belated recognition of a possible human connection.

Nicklaus’s appearance in the diaries is limited, but sharply observed. His changing proportions in photographs, his concern about looking cocky, and his uncertainty about Warhol’s art all complicate the simple idea of a celebrity portrait as a record of an already settled public identity. The sitting shows that the image was negotiated in real time: Nicklaus chose the expression he preferred, while Warhol’s wider method would subject any chosen image to cropping, retouching, color, and screen-printing.