Natalie portrait

The Natalie portrait was a Warhol painting whose fate depended not only on its image but on where it was shown, who might buy it, and how a sale could affect the value of other works. In the diary, it appears at Si Newhouse’s home as a possible purchase, while Warhol weighs the competing interests of collectors gathered around the same dinner table. The account places the portrait inside a larger system in which commissioned images were made, displayed, and priced as both likenesses and market objects.

Identity and Context

The diary identifies the work as the Natalie picture or portrait, but does not specify Natalie’s identity, the portrait’s appearance, or its dimensions. Warhol reports that Si Newhouse had the picture at home. Another Natalie portrait, he thought, was somewhere else; in the same entry he also worried about a missing work at The Factory that might be rolled up. The passage distinguishes the portrait in Newhouse’s possession from the uncertain whereabouts of other works, without resolving their eventual locations.

The work belonged to a period when portrait commissions were a major part of Warhol’s activity and brought in a substantial share of his annual income. Portraits continued to occupy corners of the studio even while he made canvases for museum and gallery exhibitions. Warhol liked receiving commissions, and people who brought clients could earn a commission themselves. That commercial setting helps explain why the Natalie portrait’s presence in a collector’s home mattered: it was at once an image and a work whose next transaction could affect its standing in the market.

How Warhol Made Portraits

Warhol’s standard portrait procedure began with the subject posing for about sixty Polaroid photographs, taken with a Polaroid Big Shot camera. He chose four images and sent them to his silkscreen printer to be made into positive images on eight-by-ten-inch acetate. After selecting one, he determined its crop and retouched the face to make the subject appear more attractive, adjusting features such as the neck, nose, lips, and complexion. The selected image was then enlarged to a forty-by-forty-inch acetate, from which the printer made a silkscreen.

The image was built up in stages rather than simply transferred as a finished photograph. Assistants prepared rolls of canvas in different flesh-tone backgrounds for men’s and women’s portraits. Warhol traced the enlarged image onto the canvas, painted in areas such as hair, eyes, lips, ties, and jackets, and then had the photographic details screened over those colors. Slight shifts between the silkscreen and the painted areas produced the portraits’ characteristic unstable, shifting appearance. The account describes Warhol’s general method; it does not establish the particular photographs or production steps used for the Natalie portrait.

Commissioning and Price

The usual price was approximately $25,000 for the first canvas and $5,000 for each additional one. Those rates made the portrait business a continuing source of income, as well as a way to extend Warhol’s celebrity-image practice beyond the famous subjects of his earlier work. In a related television portrait project, Warhol insisted that he would not do another unpaid job; Vincent Fremont arranged a contract, with Carly Simon paying most of the cost. That example shows how fees and negotiated terms formed part of the portrait’s production, not an afterthought to it.

Display and Market Value

Warhol’s concern about the Natalie portrait sharpened around a dinner at the Newhouse home. Peter Brant and Sandy were expected to be there, and Warhol hoped Newhouse would buy the painting. He saw no certain outcome: Brant and Sandy might instead offer Newhouse one of Warhol’s works that they already owned, or they might encourage him to pay a high price for the Natalie portrait so that the value of their own paintings would rise. The portrait’s reception was therefore entangled with the interests of several collectors, rather than determined by the image alone.

This episode gives the Natalie portrait a specific place in Warhol’s art economy. It was not merely waiting for an admirer; its possible sale could become part of a strategy that affected the valuation of other works. Warhol’s attention to who held the painting, who might acquire it, and what the transaction could do to prices reveals how closely his commissioned portraits joined likeness, circulation, and market calculation.