Warhol’s Hammer and Sickle works

Warhol’s Hammer and Sickle works recur in the diary as finished art, unfinished labor, and social occasion. Their January 1977 opening at Castelli Gallery brought a large work and eight smaller ones into a crowded gathering; months later, their Paris presentation at Galerie Daniel Templon drew punks, fashion figures, and a disruptive fight. Between those events, a dispute over how the works had been cut and stretched showed that their production remained open to revision, and that effort could be rejected even after it had been expended.

The Works and Their First Opening

On January 11, 1977, the works were the focus of an opening at Castelli Gallery. At six o’clock, people were still waiting at the office to go together. The gallery initially seemed empty, but guests gathered around the bar, drinking champagne, and the room soon became packed. The display included one large Hammer & Sickle and eight smaller ones. The diary records their scale and number directly, setting the repeated motif against the changing density of the room rather than offering an explanation of what it meant.

The opening placed the art among performance and clothing as well as conversation. Victor performed by cutting up a shirt. Bianca Jagger arrived wearing a dress from Halston’s window that Victor had marked with footprints; Catherine Guinness wore a red outfit he had also marked. Paulette Goddard asked Warhol to make her a Hammer & Sickle pin. The requested pin brought the motif beyond the gallery wall into the imagined space of personal adornment, though the diary does not say whether one was made.

Opening Night as Social Display

The guest list and its absences mattered to the occasion. Halston arrived carrying a small painting by Elizabeth Taylor, who had not come to the opening; he had just been with her. Warhol registered disappointment that she had missed it, imagining that her attendance would have made the event more significant. The gift stood in for the absent star, while the diary made celebrity presence itself part of the opening’s perceived importance.

Other guests included David Whitney, Philip Johnson, David White, Tony Portago and his mother Carroll Portago. Warhol noticed that Bianca Jagger and Tony Portago looked deeply in love, a relationship he said had begun over the holidays. After the opening, Warhol gave Jed Johnson $200 to entertain guests at dinner because he had to go to John Richardson’s. Thus the evening divided into parallel obligations: the opening gathered people around the works, while Warhol’s next engagement pulled him away from the dinner that followed.

Revision and Disagreement in the Studio

The works also appear not as settled objects but as the subject of a disagreement about labor and finish. On February 2, Warhol and Ronnie argued after Warhol said he did not want the Hammers & Sickles cut and stretched in the way Ronnie had prepared them while he was away. Ronnie felt that his work had been for nothing. Warhol countered that he could not know what he wanted until he saw what he did not want, and Ronnie accepted that the effort had at least given Warhol something to react against. His objection, as the diary presents it, was to work done for no reason at all.

The exchange gives the works a process history without resolving their final form. Cutting and stretching were concrete acts of preparation, but Warhol’s judgment depended on seeing the result before deciding against it. The diary records no settled compromise or final production decision. Instead, it preserves a tension between the maker’s need to test possibilities and the assistant’s concern that effort should lead toward an intended result.

The Paris Presentation

The Hammer & Sickle works later opened at Galerie Daniel Templon in Paris. At the Centre Pompidou, where Warhol had been signing books, Daniel Templon appeared and told him that he would present the show the following Tuesday. Around one hundred young people in punk clothes were there for the signing. When Warhol subsequently went to the gallery for the opening, he noted that the same punks had come, alongside São Schlumberger, dressed in blue Givenchy. The exhibition therefore carried a crowd from a book-signing encounter into the gallery, where punk style and high fashion occupied the same event.

The opening’s disorder was immediate and physical. Some punks fought, and one lost a tooth. They began shouting Warhol’s name so loudly that he was locked inside the office. On his way out to dinner, a drunken man kissed him on the lips, leaving him close to fainting. The account makes the exhibition’s public life less a quiet encounter with the works than a sequence of crowd pressure, confinement, and unwanted contact. It does not state that the works caused these incidents; it shows the opening as an unruly social setting around them.

The Works in the Diary

Across the New York and Paris entries, the works connect the controlled business of exhibiting with occasions that refuse to remain controlled. The New York opening begins with an empty room and grows crowded around champagne; the Paris opening brings familiar punk attendees, a fight, and a forced retreat into an office. In the studio, meanwhile, the same works provoke disagreement over how they should be physically prepared. Taken together, these appearances establish the Hammer and Sickle motif as a recurring focus of making, display, and public attention, while leaving its political or personal meaning unstated in the diary.