Amir Abbas Hoveyda

Amir Abbas Hoveyda appears in Andy Warhol’s diary as Iran’s ambassador in New York, a position that brought him into close contact with Warhol’s portrait business and social circle. Though the diary offers only brief glimpses of him, those scenes show him moving between the embassy, royal portrait commissions, and Warhol’s office.

Ambassador and portrait patron

At the Iranian embassy, Warhol posed for photographs with the queen in front of his portrait of her. She told him she was jealous of Hoveyda because he had eight Warhols while she had four. The comparison presents Hoveyda’s collection as a measure of his standing in Warhol’s portrait world: the ambassador possessed more of the artist’s work than the royal subject herself.

Arranging a royal portrait

At another embassy gathering, the ambassador proposed that Polaroids be taken immediately for a portrait of Princess Ashraf Pahlavi. He and Warhol went into a room to make the photographs, and Warhol recorded that the sitting was easy. The embassy was crowded with thirty or forty movie directors and producers, placing the portrait session within a busy social gathering rather than a formal studio appointment. Hoveyda’s direct participation made him a practical intermediary between the princess and Warhol’s portrait process.

The embassy and Warhol’s social circle

Hoveyda also brought Mr. and Mrs. Ghaferi, described in the diary as a famous Iranian and his wife, to Warhol’s office before the group went to dinner at Ballato’s. This small episode extends his role beyond arranging royal sittings: he could bring guests from his own circle into Warhol’s workplace and into the artist’s evening plans. Across these encounters, Hoveyda emerges less through personal disclosure than through the access he enabled—to portraits, people, and settings where political and cultural prominence met Warhol’s image-making enterprise.