Andy Warhol—Anthony d’Offay

Andy Warhol—Anthony d’Offay was a gallery collaboration marked by both practical confidence and disagreement over who should shape Warhol’s work for exhibition. In 1986, d’Offay’s enthusiasm for Warhol’s 1986 Self-Portraits helped bring them toward a London show, but his preferences as a selector and “art director” repeatedly diverged from Warhol’s. The relationship nevertheless delivered sales, professional opportunities, and conspicuous personal hospitality, making the exhibition a success whose terms Warhol did not entirely control.

Recognition and an early disagreement

On May 5, 1986, d’Offay was in Warhol’s office and had decided that he loved the Self-Portraits. His enthusiasm arrived after a period when the people considering the works had seemed uncertain, leaving Warhol doubtful that they would take them. The reversal was significant: d’Offay’s response supplied a clear vote of confidence in a body of work whose reception had appeared unsettled.

The same portraits also became the subject of a separate practical complication. Keith Haring wanted to use them on T-shirts for The Pop Shop, and Warhol agreed. By the time he recorded the decision, about two hundred shirts had reportedly been made, and he thought they might all have to be bought back. The diary does not explain why that would be necessary or establish that d’Offay caused the problem. It does, however, place the portraits at the intersection of gallery presentation and another artist’s commercial use, just as their exhibition prospects were taking shape.

By May 21, d’Offay’s response had changed—or, more precisely, his judgment had become more selective. After flying in from London, he told Warhol that he disliked these Self-Portraits, while preferring other portraits Warhol had made. His objection focused on the images in which Warhol’s hair was up, like Jean-Michel Basquiat’s. Rupert Smith had been working hard on the pictures, which made the criticism more than an abstract difference of taste: it touched work already receiving substantial attention from Warhol’s studio. Warhol described d’Offay’s intervention as that of a gallery owner acting as an art director. The phrase captures the central tension in their collaboration: d’Offay was not merely deciding whether to exhibit the pictures; he was asserting preferences about which versions should represent Warhol.

The London exhibition

When Warhol traveled from New York to London on July 6, d’Offay met him on arrival. The visit combined gallery business with a tightly organized social welcome: Warhol stayed at the Ritz Hotel, and Tina Chow arranged a dinner at Mr. Chow’s, where Mick Jagger, Jerry Hall, Nick Rhodes, Billy Boy, and others gathered. These details place d’Offay’s professional relationship with Warhol within a wider network of hospitality and introductions, rather than limiting it to the exchange of pictures and payments.

The gallery opening followed on July 8. Warhol went to the gallery for lunch, returned to the hotel, and later came back for the crowded opening. He spent two hours signing autographs as photographers recorded the event. Afterward, d’Offay hosted a dinner of roughly one hundred people at Café Royal, an expensive reception on a scale that made the opening a major social occasion as well as an exhibition. Warhol’s account also records the practical work around the event: Chris Makos followed up with a group interested in having Warhol appear in a music video, and Fred Hughes took Warhol home after the dinner.

That public success did not mean the final selection reflected Warhol’s own choices. On July 13, looking back after returning to New York, he described the experience of entering a room filled with pictures of himself that he considered among the worst he had seen. He emphasized that these were not the pictures he had selected. According to his account, d’Offay had directed the show: he would specify a picture, Warhol would later make a different selection because he assumed d’Offay would not remember the first choice, and d’Offay would then point out the mismatch when he returned to New York. The disagreement was therefore not simply about one disliked portrait. It involved a recurring gap between d’Offay’s stated choices and Warhol’s decisions about what to hang.

Warhol also recalled a specific dispute over the camouflage pictures. D’Offay wanted the smaller versions rather than the large one, another instance in which his preferences shaped the exhibition’s presentation. Yet the account does not depict the relationship as a rupture. Warhol acknowledged d’Offay’s class and kindness: at 7:30 in the morning, d’Offay and his wife came to the hotel to say goodbye. Warhol had thought they might travel with him to the airport, but they did not. He estimated that their hotel bill would come to about ten thousand dollars, a substantial piece of the hospitality surrounding the visit.

Sales, support, and the balance of control

Warhol’s retrospective assessment of the trip held its artistic frustrations beside its concrete gains. He reported that the London visit produced a large amount of work and sales of many paintings, including one to Carnegie-Mellon. D’Offay also offered to pay Chris Makos’s hotel bill. Chris had made eighteen phone calls a day to New York, a detail Warhol included with wry recognition of the expense, and he secured five jobs in London, one from Polaroid. Chris thanked Warhol for the trip; Warhol, in turn, credited Chris with taking care of him in his own way.

D’Offay’s support thus extended beyond arranging an opening. He helped create the conditions for sales and professional opportunities during the London stay and offered to absorb a colleague’s hotel costs. At the same time, those benefits did not erase Warhol’s reservations about the exhibition’s choices. He could appreciate d’Offay’s generosity and still register the discomfort of seeing pictures selected against his preferences. The relationship’s defining feature was this coexistence: d’Offay could be a valued advocate and host while exercising a level of curatorial authority Warhol found intrusive.

Significance of the collaboration

The diary’s account makes the gallery relationship visible through small logistical and financial particulars as well as artistic disagreement: two hundred T-shirts that might need to be bought back, a crowded opening, two hours of autographs, a dinner for about one hundred, and an estimated hotel bill of ten thousand dollars. These details show how the presentation of Warhol’s art depended on a network of image-making, selection, promotion, hospitality, and expense. The portraits were not only objects to be judged; they circulated among the studio, the gallery, a shop, and an audience of photographers and guests.

Warhol’s account gives no final resolution to the differences over selection, and it does not suggest that d’Offay’s choices ended the collaboration. Instead, it preserves a more mixed arrangement: a dealer whose enthusiasm and resources materially benefited Warhol, and whose opinions could also press into the artist’s own decisions about how his image should be shown. The London exhibition’s success and Warhol’s dissatisfaction with its selection remain side by side, neither canceling the other.