Iranian embassy

In Andy Warhol’s diary, the Iranian embassy is more than a diplomatic address: it is a recurring meeting place where portrait commissions and political personalities share space with film-industry guests and New York social life. Warhol visits to photograph members of the Iranian royal family, attend dinners, and encounter an unusually varied circle of visitors.

A Diplomatic Setting Turned Social

The embassy could draw a crowd well beyond diplomatic circles. On one visit, Warhol found thirty or forty film directors and producers gathered there, including Elia Kazan, Milos Forman, and Lester Persky. The scale of the gathering made the embassy feel like a meeting ground for the film world as much as an official venue.

The social traffic extended across different visits. Warhol noted seeing Otto Preminger there repeatedly over a few days; during another visit, Maximilian Schell, Sissy Spacek, Bella Abzug, and Shirley MacLaine were among those present. At a dinner, Barry Landau arrived with Margaret Trudeau, while Bella Abzug and her husband came with Shirley MacLaine. These encounters show the embassy functioning as a place where political, cinematic, and society circles overlapped.

Portraits and Royal Encounters

Portraiture gave Warhol a direct reason to visit. At one embassy gathering, he posed with the queen, Farah Pahlavi, in front of his portrait of her. She compared the number of Warhol works she owned with Amir Abbas Hoveyda’s collection: he had eight, she said, while she had four. The remark made the artist’s work part of the conversation and gave the portrait encounter the character of a friendly comparison between prominent patrons.

On another occasion, Amir Abbas Hoveyda proposed making Polaroids for a portrait of Princess Ashraf Pahlavi immediately. Warhol and the princess went into a room to take them, and he described the process as easy. The embassy thus served not only as a place to display completed work but also as a practical setting for generating images and arranging portraiture.

Hospitality and Social Brokerage

The diary also records the embassy through its meals and personal exchanges. Warhol described one dinner as the best he had attended there. He observed that Princess Ashraf ate heartily, while Farah Pahlavi ate little; he speculated that the queen might fear poisoning, although the food was tasted beforehand. The contrast is recorded as Warhol’s impression, not as an established explanation for her behavior.

At another gathering, Warhol introduced Bianca Jagger to Maximilian Schell. He was surprised by Schell’s warmth and by the intensity of the pair’s mutual interest, and Bianca later told him she had fallen for an older man for the first time. In this scene the embassy becomes a stage for Warhol’s role as social intermediary: alongside making portraits and noting who attended, he connected people whose encounter continued beyond the initial introduction.