Vancouver was the last stop on Andy Warhol’s November 1976 trip and the setting for an Ace Gallery exhibition opening he regarded as poorly matched to local interest in painting. In the diary, the city appears both as an art-world destination and as a brief, sharply observed episode in a journey that moved through Seattle and Los Angeles before returning to New York.

The exhibition stop

The trip had begun with an opening at the Seattle Art Museum, continued to Los Angeles for Marisa Berenson’s wedding to Jim Randall, and then brought Warhol to Vancouver for his Ace Gallery show opening. His verdict on the local art audience was terse: he wrote that nobody in Vancouver bought art and that its residents were not interested in painting. The entry offers no sales figures or other evidence for the generalization; it preserves his own dismissive assessment of the exhibition’s reception.

Questions on the way home

On November 24, Warhol got up at 7 a.m. and took a cab to the airport, recording a $15 fare, a $5 tip, and $5 for magazines. Catherine Guinness, who had not become impatient until the last day, repeatedly asked him what Pop Art was during the two-hour flight. He compared her questioning to an earlier Interview conversation with blues musician Albert King, when she had repeatedly asked what soul food was. Warhol presented the exchange as an irritation, while the comparison made her persistence part of a recurring comic pattern in his account of her.

Return and narrative place

After the flight, Warhol dropped off Fred Hughes and took a cab from La Guardia, noting a $13 fare and $7 tip; Catherine paid the driver the full $20. He then got home and ate an early Thanksgiving dinner with Jed Johnson. The entry closes Vancouver’s place in the itinerary through the small practical markers of departure and arrival: airport, cab, tip, and home. Rather than develop the city as a sustained portrait, the diary makes it a single travel episode whose defining impression is Warhol’s skepticism about the local market for painting.