Paris is a recurring European setting in Andy Warhol’s diary, but not a settled home or a self-contained destination. It is a city encountered through movement: dinners, meetings, cafés, exhibitions, hotel rooms, airports, and the effort to stay connected while away. Across visits in 1980 and 1987, Paris brings together professional errands and social life, yet the diary’s attention repeatedly returns to practical details and private unease. The result is a portrait of the city as both an international stage and a temporary place to sleep, work, wait, and leave.

Travel, Work, and the City

In April 1980, Warhol was in Paris with Fred Hughes. The trip’s social and professional possibilities are visible in a visit to Kim D’Estainville’s new shop near the Arc de Triomphe. Kim was recovering after his Broadway play folded, while Warhol noted that there was nobody in town to approach about advertising. The entry makes the visit more than sightseeing: Paris was also a place where commercial prospects depended on who was present and available. Their evening continued at Club Sept, where dinner brought together models and other guests, and where the quality of the company became part of Warhol’s account of the night.

The same Paris stay connected Warhol to stories circulating about New York. At dinner, photographer Francesco Scavullo repeated gossip about Warhol’s supposed conduct at Studio 54, which left Warhol surprised and intent on finding out where the stories had originated. The conversation also brought news that Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager had sold Studio 54. Warhol recorded the sale as the end of an era, making the Paris dinner a point from which New York’s changing social scene could be observed at a distance. Reports about Halston and Bianca Jagger, and the planned conversion of Bonds into a discotheque, further turned the table into a relay for news from home.

Paris also served as a setting for more direct professional and social exchanges. In July 1980, Warhol and Hughes had dinner at Castel’s and encountered Jean, the boyfriend of Clara Sant. Clara told Hughes that Jean had felt neglected during a visit to their New York studio. Warhol recognized that the studio’s habit of ignoring visitors had not translated well across the two cities, and regretted that they had not made more effort to welcome someone who had treated them warmly in Europe. The costly dinner, which Warhol paid for, became a small act of reciprocity: a recognition that the social rules of the New York studio did not automatically suit their European guests.

Cafés, Encounters, and Unease

Cafés structure Warhol’s time in Paris as places to wait, meet, and watch for familiar people. In July 1980, he and Hughes went to Café de Flore, found it closed, and settled at Deux Magots while hoping Shirley Goldfarb might appear. Goldfarb was rehearsing for a show Pierre Berge was organizing, in which she planned to sing restaurant menus alongside familiar songs. Warhol anticipated that the performance might prove less amusing in reality than it sounded in conversation. The episode captures the diary’s characteristic combination of social expectation and wary judgment: a possible encounter becomes an occasion to assess both the person and the performance being planned.

The café circuit could also expose Warhol’s uncertainty. On a night in April, he had two nightmares about people falling from planes. Before leaving Paris the following day, he worried that Hughes might have slipped out of their hotel room while he slept. He had heard the door and other sounds that seemed to confirm the possibility, but did not get up to check; Hughes later said he had not left. Warhol connected this fear to his discomfort when alone in an unfamiliar place and to his habit of not keeping people’s telephone numbers, resolving to keep them in the future. The entry gives Paris a private dimension absent from the public itinerary: distance from home sharpened his reliance on companions and made ordinary travel uncertainty feel consequential.

Returning from Paris to New York in July, Warhol recorded the flight as timely but monotonous, with service that left too much time to sit and become restless. At customs, officials searched his pockets and shoes and questioned the medicines he carried. He left determined to be more careful about what he packed, even worrying that his wigs might attract scrutiny on a later trip. Paris in these entries is therefore not only a destination but one part of a transatlantic routine in which the airport, luggage, and return journey shape the experience as much as the city itself.

Art and a Stopover Before Milan

In January 1987, Paris again appears as a temporary base, this time with Chris Makos and Hughes. Warhol disliked leaving pleasant New York weather and arrived carrying layered clothes, only to find his room at Hotel Lenox cold. He described it as small but attractive, with old French woodwork; Makos, whose room was better, arranged for two heaters. Their first outing was a brief meal at Café de Flore, where they were the last customers to leave. These details keep the hotel and café from becoming abstract symbols of Parisian glamour: they are places measured by room size, warmth, food, and the practical advantages one companion secures over another.

The next day, Warhol and Makos visited the Centre Pompidou. They saw a Julian Schnabel exhibition that Warhol found impressive, then went to a Japanese exhibition whose work he thought borrowed extensively from Western art, including Frank Lloyd Wright. The visit placed contemporary art and cross-cultural influence side by side, with Warhol making quick judgments as he moved from one show to the next. Even an unusual modern restroom at the Centre Pompidou registered in his account: Makos had to explain how to use a glass surface with water running behind it. The episode extends the diary’s attention from artworks to the designed spaces through which visitors encounter them.

Paris was also a place to catch up on people and publications before continuing the trip. Warhol encountered photographer Art Kane, learned that Kane had married again, bought magazines, and tried to reach younger acquaintances for dinner without getting an answer. When Makos noticed that their tickets routed them to Rome rather than Milan, he handled the calls to correct the itinerary; Warhol decided the travel agent should be dismissed. In the next entry, the party left Paris for Milan. Paris thus occupies an interval between arrival and onward movement, where art viewing, social calls, reading, and travel arrangements briefly converge. Its significance in the diary lies in that combination: the city is at once a cultural destination, a working environment, a social network, and a stop along a journey whose next leg is never far from view.