Leo Castelli Gallery

Leo Castelli Gallery occupies two roles in Andy Warhol’s diary: it is a place where his work gathers a fashionable public, and a business relationship he comes to judge in terms of commissions, prices, loans, and missed opportunities. The contrast is sharpest between the crowded 1977 opening of his Hammer & Sickle paintings and his complaints in 1985 about the gallery’s handling of his work. The diary records the Gallery not through an institutional history but through the changing practical and social stakes Warhol attaches to it.

An opening as a social scene

On January 11, 1977, Warhol went to Leo Castelli Gallery for the opening of his Hammer & Sickle exhibition. The office had been waiting since six o’clock to go together. At first the gallery was empty; then people gathered around the bar setup, drank champagne, and the room filled. The exhibition centered on one large Hammer & Sickle and eight smaller ones. The sequence makes the opening feel like a social event taking shape in real time: an initially quiet room becomes crowded as its guests arrive and assemble around both the art and the drinks.

The visitors included David Whitney, Philip Johnson, and David White. Paulette Goddard arrived and asked Warhol to make her a Hammer & Sickle pin. Victor was present, cutting up a shirt as a performance. Bianca Jagger arrived wearing a dress from Halston’s window that Victor had marked with footprints; Catherine Guinness wore another outfit he had treated in the same way. These details place the Gallery within a network of fashion, performance, celebrity, and art, without reducing the exhibition to any one of those elements. The works were on view, but the event’s public character was also made by what guests wore, did, requested, and watched.

Halston brought a small painting Elizabeth Taylor had made for Warhol. Taylor did not attend the opening, and Warhol recorded his disappointment that her presence would have made the occasion feel more important. The absent star and the painting she sent became part of his account of the evening: the Gallery’s social importance was measured partly by who appeared in person and partly by the objects and messages carried in their place. Afterward, Warhol gave Jed Johnson $200 to entertain at dinner because Warhol himself had to go to John Richardson’s gathering. The opening thus extended beyond the exhibition room into a sequence of overlapping social obligations.

The 1985 exhibition and Warhol’s reservations

By September 1985, Warhol’s account of an opening at the Gallery had a more dissatisfied tone. He was due to attend the presentation of his Reigning Queens portfolio, but said he hated George Mulder for showing the portfolio in America: the works, Warhol believed, were meant only for Europe, and American audiences did not care about royalty. He anticipated another bad review. His concern was not simply whether the works would be seen, but whether their presentation in this market would produce a reception he considered damaging.

The strained mood extended to Jean-Michel Basquiat. After a newspaper headline described the two artists as a pas de deux and called Basquiat Warhol’s mascot, Warhol asked him not to come to this opening. He also asked whether Basquiat was angry with him over the review; Basquiat said he was not. The diary does not establish that the Gallery caused the press characterization or the tension between the artists. It does show the exhibition situated amid Warhol’s worries about reviews, the framing of his artistic relationship with Basquiat, and the way a public presentation might shape how that relationship was understood.

Commissions, prices, and the missing painting

In October 1985, the Gallery appears in Warhol’s account as a business counterpart. He was trying to locate a Mao painting in Europe for Mr. Chow, who wanted it; finding the work would make a sale possible. The painting, however, was one Leo had lent out and that had never been returned. Warhol described their arrangement as one in which Leo received a commission if he sold something, while questioning whether Leo had done enough to raise the prices of his work. This distinction matters: the diary records a defined financial arrangement, but Warhol’s complaint concerns the effort and advocacy he felt should accompany it.

Warhol also measured the Gallery against other artists and dealers. He speculated that Roy Cohn and Jasper Johns kept it going, and recalled that Leo could have presented a show of Basquiat’s work and his own but did not want the paintings. Tony Shafrazi, by contrast, was the dealer Warhol said had wanted them. The episode places the Gallery within a competitive art world where an exhibition depended not only on an artist’s work but also on a dealer’s willingness to show it. Warhol’s comparison records a missed possibility as well as a distinction between Castelli’s decision and Shafrazi’s interest.

The Mao painting remained unresolved in a later entry: Warhol said it was still lost somewhere in Europe, with Nice considered a possible location, and blamed Leo. He also repeated a report that Leo had become indiscriminate in agreeing to requests from women. These are Warhol’s judgments and reported impressions, not an independent account of the Gallery’s conduct. Read alongside the commission arrangement and the earlier loan, however, they reveal how a specific missing work could sharpen a wider grievance about responsibility, access, and the Gallery’s attention to his prices.

The Gallery in the diary

Across these entries, Leo Castelli Gallery shifts from a crowded room where champagne, clothes, performance, and paintings shared the evening to a business relationship evaluated through sales and decisions about what to exhibit. The 1977 opening presents the Gallery as a stage for public attention; the 1985 entries emphasize Warhol’s anxiety about reception and his doubts about the dealer’s work on his behalf. The missing Mao painting gives that dissatisfaction a concrete object: a loan that had not come back, a possible sale that could not proceed, and an unresolved question of responsibility. The diary’s changing emphasis makes the Gallery significant not as a fixed backdrop but as a place and institution whose value to Warhol depended on what it displayed, whom it brought together, and whether it could help his work find buyers and favorable attention.