Warhol's commissioned portraiture

Warhol's commissioned portraiture joined a methodical image-making process to a practical business that helped support his studio and magazine. The portraits transformed clients’ photographs through selection, cosmetic alteration, painted color, and silkscreen, while their commissions extended Warhol’s idea of portrait subjects beyond entertainment celebrities to private individuals. The resulting image was neither a simple record of a sitter nor a spontaneous painting: it was the outcome of a carefully managed chain of choices about how that sitter would appear.

From celebrity portraits to a continuing business

For most of the 1970s and through the end of his life, finding clients for portraits was a major part of Warhol’s activity and supplied a substantial share of his annual income. Even when he was preparing canvases for museum and gallery exhibitions, portraits were being worked on in some corner of the studio. The business also had a clear incentive for those who brought in clients: gallery dealers, friends, and employees who secured a commission received a commission themselves.

Ronnie Cutrone described this work as a practical evolution. Pop Art’s prominence had passed, new art movements had appeared, and Warhol still had an office to run and a magazine that he felt needed his financial support. In the 1960s, he had made portraits of show-business legends such as Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley, and Marlon Brando. Commissioning portraits of private or otherwise non-show-business subjects extended that practice: such clients could be made equal, in a sense, to the legends. The shift did not mean that Warhol had never depicted non-stars before; even in the 1960s, he had made commissioned portraits of art collector Ethel Scull, gallery owner Holly Solomon, and Happy Rockefeller. Fred Hughes recalled that the art establishment considered commissioned portraiture unconventional for an artist, but Warhol liked doing it and, after the first commissions, wanted more.

A staged photographic process

A sitting began with Warhol taking approximately sixty Polaroid photographs of the subject, using a Polaroid Big Shot camera. When the model was discontinued, he arranged to buy the manufacturer’s remaining unused stock. The volume of shots gave him a field of possibilities rather than a single supposedly definitive likeness. He selected four photographs and sent them to a screen printer, who made positive images on 8-by-10-inch acetate sheets. Before 1977 he worked with Alex Heinrici as his silkscreener; afterward, Rupert Smith took that role.

Once the acetates returned, Warhol chose one image and decided how to crop it. He then altered the sitter’s appearance to make it more attractive by his standards: he might lengthen a neck, trim a nose, enlarge lips, or clear a complexion. The chosen and retouched image was enlarged from 8 by 10 inches to a 40-inch-square acetate, which the printer used to make a silkscreen. Each stage narrowed the alternatives and changed the photograph: a pose became a selected image, the image became a corrected design, and the design became a reproducible screen.

Color, registration, and the finished surface

Warhol’s assistants prepared rolls of canvas in advance, using one flesh-tone background for men’s portraits and a pinker flesh tone for women’s. Warhol transferred the image from the enlarged acetate onto the prepared canvas with carbon paper beneath tracing paper. He painted selected colored areas by hand: hair, eyes, and, for women, lips; for men, ties and jackets. When the silkscreen was ready, its photographic details were aligned over those painted areas and printed onto the canvas.

The alignment was not always exact. Slight variations between the screen image and the colored painting beneath it produced the characteristic shifting appearance of the portraits. The finished effect therefore arose not only from Warhol’s cosmetic decisions but also from the relation between two image-making systems: painted color and screened photographic detail. His process sought to improve or intensify a sitter’s appearance, yet the visible slippage between layers kept the result from becoming a perfectly seamless illusion.

Price, celebrity, and public image

The portraits had a defined commercial structure: the first canvas generally cost about $25,000, with each additional canvas priced at $5,000. That schedule made the work both an artwork and a service with repeatable stages and costs. Its business importance connected portrait-making to the wider operation of Warhol’s studio, while the commission network allowed clients, dealers, friends, and staff to participate in bringing subjects into the process.

The same interest in public image ran through Warhol’s work with Interview. By 1976 the magazine’s cultivated, self-mocking glamour helped attract celebrities, and the promise of appearing in its pages had become a regular way to bring new people to the office. A portrait and a magazine appearance were different forms of exposure, but both placed an individual’s image into a system of selection and circulation. The portrait process made that construction unusually tangible: a person posed, was photographed repeatedly, had a preferred image chosen and retouched, and became a printed likeness.

Diary entries also record Warhol photographing Sylvester Stallone and using ten rolls of film because Stallone’s proportions seemed to change markedly from one angle to another. In another project, Warhol agreed to paint Carly Simon’s portrait for a television program, alongside portraits by Larry Rivers and Marisol; Vincent Fremont negotiated a contract, and Simon was to pay most of the cost. These accounts show the method’s continuing connection to celebrity and media, while also documenting the practical arrangements behind a portrait commission.

Portraiture as a constructed record

The portrait’s photographic basis did not make it a neutral likeness. Warhol’s sequence of choices—how to pose and photograph a sitter, which image to retain, how to crop and cosmetically alter it, and how to combine screen and paint—made the client’s public-facing appearance a designed object. The process preserved recognizable features while actively revising them, balancing photographic evidence against an idealized presentation.

The surviving account of this practice is itself mediated. Pat Hackett described the procedure and edited the diary from an original 20,000 pages, cutting whole days, weeks, or portions of entries for publication. That editorial context cautions against treating any single diary report as an exhaustive record of every commission. Even so, the concrete description of the production sequence reveals how portraiture operated across image-making and commerce: the sitter supplied a presence, Warhol and his assistants shaped its appearance, and the finished canvases carried that constructed likeness into the art market.