Warhol is commissioned to design a ballet curtain and poster

The ballet curtain and poster commission began as a request for Andy Warhol to design for a ballet project, but it quickly became a broader exchange about authorship, visual direction, and performance. Warhol’s diary records both his reservations about the initial proposal and his growing interest in Peter Martins’s ideas, while leaving the commission’s final outcome undocumented.

The commission and its first design question

At a ballet lunch organized by Paige at the office, Anne Bass arrived with Peter Martins, Heather Watts, Ulrik Trojaborg, and Bruce Padgett. The group wanted Warhol to design a curtain and a poster. His first response was practical: he thought he should have directed them to Fred Hughes, and he doubted he could make use of the little gold Noguchi lion medallion Martins had brought to show him. If the design was to follow that object, he thought, Noguchi himself should make it; if Warhol was to contribute, the result ought to feel more American.

That reaction set out a distinction between simply accepting a commission and finding a visual approach he considered his own. The medallion offered a specific point of departure, but Warhol resisted treating it as a ready-made solution for his work. His remarks did not end the project: in a later entry, he described Martins as someone who did have strong ideas, revising his earlier judgment.

From proposal to working relationship

After going to church, Warhol joined Paige for a ballet performance. The program included Symphony in C, which he had not seen for years, followed by two works by Jerome Robbins. They sat in Martins’s seats, and Warhol watched Jock and Heather perform. The evening also gave the collaboration a practical next step: the company told him he could photograph them for as long as he wanted, and he planned to begin.

The opportunity to photograph the dancers extended Warhol’s involvement beyond the proposed curtain and poster. The diary presents photography as a new activity made possible by the company’s invitation, though it does not describe the resulting images or say whether they fed into the stage commission.

Stage ideas and visual play

Warhol’s account of Martins’s ideas supplied a more concrete direction for the project. Martins had discussed the Touch Tag concept with Stephen Sprouse: children playing football would wear clothes fastened with Velcro, pulling the pieces apart instead of tackling one another in shoulder pads. They were working on a ballet called Fluorescent Orange, and the children had also thought of fluorescent snow. Warhol’s earlier skepticism thus gave way to interest in the imaginative details emerging around the production.

He also offered ideas of his own. When Ulrik Trojaborg said he had not had time to walk his dog, Warhol jokingly suggested using Heather’s forceful manner to propose putting the dog onstage, where no one would notice it. He then described a Shower ballet he had long imagined: after a strenuous dance number, nude dancers would shower and shake water toward the audience. These were proposals and jokes recorded in conversation, not evidence that either ballet was staged.

An unfinished record

Across the entries, the commission develops from an initial request into a lively exchange among Warhol, Martins, Sprouse, and the ballet company. The medallion prompts Warhol to define the kind of contribution he would accept; the performance and Martins’s later ideas make him more receptive; and the invitation to photograph the dancers opens a parallel creative possibility. The available diary passages establish the project’s concepts and early working context, but do not say whether Warhol ultimately designed or completed the curtain or poster.