Nursing mother and infant theme

Nursing mother and infant theme was a planned photographic project that brought together the Madonna image, the contemporary mother and child, and Andy Warhol’s own interest in eroticism. The diary records the idea taking shape through images encountered in everyday life, followed by a real sitting with Chris Makos; it also preserves Warhol’s uncertainty about whether the project could continue as a series.

Origins and visual premise

The idea emerged during a visit to a bookshop, where Warhol found an image that prompted him to work on mothers with babies. He traced the idea partly to Eunice Shriver and partly to a Madonna he had seen in an apartment: a baby resting on a woman he considered sexy. The combination mattered to him. The traditional Madonna-and-child image offered a recognizable visual framework, while his attention to the woman’s attractiveness recast that framework through a contemporary, erotic sensibility.

Warhol wanted Chris Makos to locate mothers whose babies had just been born. The project was therefore not only an image he had encountered but a subject he meant to develop through arranged sittings. In the diary, the mothers appear chiefly through the artist’s descriptions and plans; their own views of being photographed are not recorded.

From concept to photographic sittings

By March 1981, the idea had moved from proposal to a session with a model identified as Jackie. Chris Makos came to photograph her with her baby, whom Warhol described favorably. His description of Jackie compared her to a beautiful version of Viva, linking the new subject to a familiar figure in his visual world. The entry documents an actual mother-and-child sitting, though it does not establish that the resulting photographs became a completed or publicly exhibited series.

A few days later, another mother and child were scheduled. Instead of presenting the appointments as proof of a settled project, Warhol recorded doubts about its prospects: he thought the series might become a problem and called the subject too strange. The contrast between arranging another sitting and anticipating difficulty gives the project its unfinished character. It had enough appeal to generate repeat appointments, but its future remained uncertain.

Images, celebrity, and the photographic gaze

The project belonged to a wider practice in which Warhol treated photography as a means of producing and shaping public images. Interview offered a steady supply of new faces, while Warhol’s commissioned portrait process involved taking about sixty photographs with a Polaroid Big Shot, selecting images for acetates, and choosing and cosmetically altering a final composition before it was transferred to canvas. The diary does not say that the mother-and-child photographs followed this portrait procedure; the parallel instead places the proposed theme within a larger, carefully managed image-making practice.

Other photographic encounters in the diary emphasize how a camera can alter the person before it. During a separate Interview session, Warhol observed that David Hockney was filmed and interviewed after lunch and described him as magnetic. In another account, a celebrity’s manner changed as he moved from an interview into a photographic session. Against that culture of posed and mediated appearances, the nursing-mother theme turned toward an intimate relation between adult and infant. Its documented development remains modest but distinct: an idea prompted by art and everyday observation, two planned sittings, one recorded session, and an artist still unsure whether the subject could sustain a series.