Athletes portrait series

The Athletes portrait series was a portfolio of sports-star portraits commissioned by Richard Weisman, bringing athletes into Andy Warhol’s expanding practice of celebrity portraiture. Its preparation involved individual sittings, a planned group of ten works, and publicity that framed athletes as the new movie stars. The series also belonged to a broader image-making system in which a posed photograph was selected, altered, transferred, and screen-printed into a deliberately constructed public likeness.

Commission and exhibition plans

Richard Weisman commissioned a series of sports-star portraits, and the project took shape through meetings and photo sessions in 1977. When Weisman came to the office on September 19, he and Fred Hughes discussed the portraits. After the diarist left their meeting, they decided on a December exhibition of the ten Athletes portraits they had settled on. The diarist thought January would be a better time. The account establishes the exhibition as a plan, rather than confirming that it took place as scheduled.

The project drew on the magazine-and-studio world that kept new faces moving through Warhol’s orbit. By the mid-1970s, Interview had become a glamorous venue for celebrities and previously unpublished beauties, while Warhol’s promise to put someone in the magazine had, in many cases, taken the place of his earlier promise of a film role. The Athletes portfolio extended that culture of visibility into sports: the subjects were presented not simply as competitors but as figures whose images could circulate as portraits.

Sittings and the subjects

Tom Seaver came to pose on July 20, 1977, with Weisman arriving separately in a limousine. The sitting included a small negotiation over how Seaver should appear. The photographer, Mr. Johnson, wanted him in a Mets hat; he also proposed a deliberately mixed image of Seaver in a Cincinnati uniform wearing the Mets hat. Seaver refused that combination. The diary notes the irony that he had recently bought a house in Connecticut and made other plans while still with the Mets, only to be traded and come to hate the team. His portrait session thus brought the athlete’s public uniform into contact with the changes in his career.

A month later, Weisman’s commission prompted a planned trip to Columbus to photograph Jack Nicklaus. The diary records the assignment and the discussion about the ten-portrait exhibition, but does not describe the eventual sitting or the finished work. On October 14, the diarist traveled to Massachusetts to photograph Dorothy Hamill for the Athletes portfolio, remarking on her beauty. The recorded sessions show the project assembling its subjects through separate appointments rather than through a single collective event.

The portfolio also attracted attention before its proposed opening. Warhol became the subject of a Post centerfold photograph taken in front of the sports paintings, accompanied by text by Jerry Tallmer. In discussing the work, he said athletes were better than movie stars, then reconsidered the distinction: athletes, he observed, were themselves the new movie stars. He worried that the resulting publicity had arrived a month ahead of the exhibition. The portraits’ promotion therefore made the status of the subjects part of the story: sports figures were being treated as a fresh class of celebrity, while the artist’s own image became a vehicle for advertising the project.

How the portraits were made

The studio’s established portrait procedure helps explain the crafted character of the Athletes images. Warhol began by photographing a sitter with a Polaroid Big Shot camera, taking about sixty pictures. From these he selected four for conversion by his screen printer into positive images on eight-by-ten-inch acetate. He then chose one image, determined its crop, and altered it cosmetically—lengthening necks, trimming noses, enlarging lips, or clearing complexions—to produce a more attractive likeness. The chosen image was enlarged to a forty-by-forty-inch acetate, from which the printer prepared the silkscreen.

The finished image was built in stages rather than reproduced as a single untouched photograph. Assistants prepared rolls of canvas in flesh-toned backgrounds, using one shade for men’s portraits and a pinker one for women’s. Warhol traced the enlarged image onto the canvas, painted selected color areas, and then aligned the silkscreen over them. Slight shifts between the screened image and the painted areas gave the portraits their characteristic shifting appearance. This account describes Warhol’s general portrait method; the diary does not specify which details of the process were used for each Athletes canvas.

Public image and significance

The series belonged to a larger movement in Warhol’s work from portraits of famous entertainers toward commissioned portraits of people outside show business. Such commissions helped support his income and operating costs, while making private clients comparable, in some sense, to established legends. The Athletes project applied that logic to sports figures: their fame and recognizable identities made them suitable subjects for portraiture, and the planned exhibition gathered them into a named portfolio.

The surviving diary details keep the project tangible without resolving every outcome. It records Seaver’s resistance to a staged uniform combination, Hamill’s Massachusetts sitting, Nicklaus’s planned appointment, and the intended show of ten portraits. Alongside the labor of photographing, retouching, and printing, the publicity debate captures the portfolio’s larger claim: athletes were no longer merely adjacent to entertainment culture but were being recognized as its latest stars.