Pop Art

Pop Art is presented as more than a style associated with Andy Warhol’s early canvases: it is also a way of making images, creating public attention, and bringing different kinds of people into the same visual field. As its place in contemporary art changed, Warhol extended its portrait practice from famous entertainers to private clients, while Interview helped make celebrity and unfamiliar faces available through another medium.

From canvases to a continuing practice

Warhol had painted his first Pop Art canvases eight years before Pat Hackett met him in 1968. By the later 1970s, the movement no longer stood alone as the dominant new direction in art. Ronnie Cutrone described a moment when Pop Art was over and new movements had arrived, while Warhol still had an office to run and a magazine he believed needed his financial support. His response was not simply to repeat the early celebrity pictures: commissioned portraiture became a substantial and continuing part of his work.

The commissioned portrait as a production process

Portrait-making proceeded through a sequence of photographic choices and alterations. Warhol took about sixty Polaroid photographs of a sitter with a Polaroid Big Shot, the camera he used exclusively; after the model was discontinued, he arranged to buy the company’s remaining stock. He selected four images for a screen printer to turn into positive images on eight-by-ten-inch acetate, then chose one, determined its crop, and retouched the image to make the sitter more attractive. The adjustments could alter neck length, nose shape, lips, and complexion.

The selected image was enlarged to a forty-by-forty-inch acetate, from which the printer made a silkscreen. Assistants kept rolls of canvas prepared in different flesh-tone grounds: one for men’s portraits and a pinker shade for women’s. Warhol traced the image onto the canvas, painted selected colors beneath it, and aligned the finished screen with those painted areas. Slight misalignments produced the portraits’ characteristic shifting appearance. The first canvas generally cost about $25,000, with each additional canvas about $5,000, making the process both a visual method and a source of income.

Celebrity, likeness, and the public image

The portraits extended a practice already associated with Warhol’s pictures of Marilyn, Liz Taylor, Elvis, and Marlon Brando. But the later commissions also brought people outside show business into the portrait format. Ronnie Cutrone understood this as a way of making private or non-entertainment clients equal, in a sense, to legends. Fred Hughes recalled that the art establishment considered commissioned portraiture unconventional for an artist, but that Warhol liked doing it and asked for more commissions after the first few arrived.

The photographic encounter could make a sitter’s appearance seem unstable rather than self-evident. When Warhol photographed Sylvester Stallone, he used ten rolls of film because the actor was difficult to capture: the proportions of his neck, chest, and hands seemed to change between frontal and side views. For a television segment on Carly Simon, Warhol was to paint her portrait alongside Larry Rivers and Marisol; he insisted on payment, and Vincent Fremont arranged a contract under which Simon would pay most of the cost. These episodes show the portrait as a negotiated image, produced through posing, selection, payment, and the artist’s decisions about what the camera-derived likeness should become.

Circulation beyond the canvas

Interview extended the work of attracting and presenting people that Warhol’s earlier films had performed for the Factory. As commercially exhibitable films became more expensive, the magazine offered a new reason for creative people, especially young people, to visit. Its growing circulation and deliberately self-mocking glamour made celebrities want to appear in it; Warhol and staff members conducted cover interviews, and the promise of a place in the magazine increasingly took the place of the promise of a movie role. Page headings highlighted young faces not previously seen in print, linking discovery and visibility to the magazine’s editorial form.

The diary’s account of a Shaun Cassidy interview makes the constructed nature of celebrity particularly visible. Cassidy gave clean, standard answers because his fans were young, but Warhol observed a change as they passed screaming admirers in a hotel lobby and later watched him transform again for a photo session. Interview, photography, and public recognition thus appear alongside the painted portrait as related means of making a public image. When Joe Kennedy praised Pop Art for bringing art to the American people, his description registered the movement’s public reach, even as Warhol’s portrait practice showed how that reach could be built from individual faces and repeated acts of selection.