Andy Warhol and Thomas Ammann's artistic collaboration

Andy Warhol and Thomas Ammann's artistic collaboration appears in the diary as a working relationship made tangible through a portrait appointment in Zurich and a lunch afterward. The record shows Ammann prompting the workday and sharing Warhol’s company, but it does not describe the portrait’s completion or establish a broader history between them. Its significance lies in the way a single European visit brings together Warhol’s image-making, the practical arrangements around a commission, and the conversation that accompanied their professional contact.

The Zurich portrait appointment

On Monday, February 11, 1980, Warhol recorded that he had slept late before Thomas Ammann woke him to do a portrait. The entry begins with the appointment as a task already in motion: Ammann gets him up, and Warhol turns to the sitter. He describes her as beautiful and her husband as fat, then notes that he told her she did not need makeup. He found her easy to portray because, in his assessment, she was exceptionally beautiful. The diary thus preserves a brief glimpse of the judgments Warhol brought to a portrait encounter, focusing first on appearance and on how little cosmetic preparation he thought the sitter needed.

The husband, Warhol reports, told his wife that she was ugly. Ammann explained this to Warhol as a Swiss way of treating wives, intended to keep them from becoming too secure. The entry does not independently verify Ammann’s generalization; it records it as his explanation of the couple’s exchange. That account places the portrait session inside a social setting in which beauty and confidence were being discussed as well as depicted. Warhol’s brief note does not say how the wife responded, but it juxtaposes Ammann’s explanation with Warhol’s own assessment of her appearance.

Afterward, they gave the couple a book and a copy of Interview, and sent out the film. Warhol also recorded a practical complication: it was difficult to find film in Zurich beyond SX-70, as other film was being phased out. The small logistical detail anchors the portrait in the material conditions of its making. The diary does not identify the book, specify what was photographed, or say whether the film was developed locally; it registers the appointment’s immediate aftermath rather than the finished image.

A commission within Warhol’s portrait practice

The Zurich session belongs to the broader portrait business that occupied Warhol throughout the 1970s and continued until his death. Commissions supplied a substantial share of his annual income, and portraits remained in progress even when he was also preparing canvases for museum and gallery exhibitions. Friends, employees, and gallery dealers who brought in commissions received a commission themselves. This context helps explain why a portrait appointment could structure a day abroad as a practical piece of work, rather than appearing only as an isolated artistic encounter.

Warhol’s usual process was systematic. He posed a subject and took approximately sixty Polaroids with a Polaroid Big Shot camera, then selected four images for a screen printer to turn into positive images on eight-by-ten-inch acetates. After choosing one, he determined the crop and altered the image cosmetically, changing features such as the neck, nose, lips, and complexion to make the sitter appear more attractive. The chosen image was enlarged to a forty-by-forty-inch acetate, from which the printer made a silkscreen. The diary does not state that the Zurich portrait followed every step of this procedure, so the process provides context for Warhol’s established practice rather than a record of this particular image’s production.

The painted canvas was prepared as part of that workflow, too. Assistants prepainted rolls of canvas in flesh-tone backgrounds: one shade for men and a pinker one for women. Warhol traced the image onto the canvas, painted colored areas such as hair, eyes, and lips, or ties and jackets, and then aligned the silkscreen with those painted passages. Small shifts between the photographic image and the color beneath it produced the characteristic shifting appearance of the portraits. The usual price was approximately $25,000 for the first canvas and $5,000 for each additional one. These details show the elaborate sequence behind the apparently direct encounter with a sitter; they do not establish the fee, number of canvases, or exact production steps for the Zurich commission.

Work extending into sociability

The diary continues from the portrait to lunch downstairs with Ammann and Loulou de la Falaise and her husband, Thadée. Warhol describes the restaurant as beautiful, with a view of the lake and mountains; they were its only diners, and sunlight came through the window onto their backs. He also notes that it had hailed that morning and that the weather had been strange. These observations give the meal a distinct setting after the morning’s work, without turning the portrait appointment into a more elaborate account than the diary supplies.

At lunch, the conversation ranged well beyond portraiture. Loulou spoke about Yves Saint Laurent’s talent and the strain his depression placed on the office. She said that she tried to act happy even when she was not, and connected that effort to stress on her liver. She also discussed her own habits and her stepfather, John McKendry, including her account of his fantasies about aristocratic life and the people he encountered through his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Warhol recorded these stories alongside the meal, making the day’s professional contact inseparable, in the diary’s telling, from social talk and personal disclosures. Nothing in the entry attributes these remarks to Ammann or indicates that the lunch concerned the portrait itself.

What the record establishes

The surviving account presents Ammann in two linked roles on the Zurich day: he wakes Warhol for a portrait, then joins him at lunch. The first scene makes his part in arranging or prompting the appointment visible; the second shows the two sharing a meal with other members of their circle. Together, these details support a working relationship accompanied by social contact, but they do not establish how the commission originated, what happened to the finished portrait, or how often the pair worked together.

That limit matters. The diary offers no formal discussion of artistic aims between Warhol and Ammann, and it does not describe Ammann directing the image or selecting its final form. Instead, it records the practical rhythm of the encounter: a late start, a sitter Warhol considered beautiful, a conversation about the way her husband treated her, gifts of a book and Interview, and film sent out despite the limited local supply. The collaboration is therefore legible in small acts of professional coordination rather than in a stated artistic program. The portrait episode shows how Warhol’s commissioned work moved through appointments, materials, and social networks, while leaving the particular image and the relationship’s longer development open.