Modern Madonnas

Modern Madonnas was Andy Warhol’s portrait project built around contemporary women and the Madonna-and-child image. The diary traces it not through a formal statement of purpose or a completed exhibition, but through invitations, sittings, and a growing unease about its subject: mothers and babies, including breastfeeding. Its significance lies in that tension. A familiar sacred image entered Warhol’s contemporary portrait practice, where the sitter’s appearance could be carefully made and remade, while the maternal subject remained strange enough to trouble the artist himself.

A project introduced through social life

The series first appears as an announced idea at a party celebrating Michael Kennedy’s marriage to Vicky Gifford. At the gathering, Eunice Shriver told Warhol that she liked Madonnas. He replied that he was working on Modern Madonnas and planned to invite her to the office. The project therefore emerged in conversation, among people whose social standing and public identities were already part of the world Warhol recorded and portrayed. His answer turned a shared interest in Madonna imagery into a possible studio visit, linking the theme to the personal encounters through which he developed his work.

A few days later, Shriver called to say that she wanted to see the Modern Madonnas, and Warhol invited her to lunch. She subsequently canceled. The diary preserves the invitation and its reversal, but does not say that she sat for a portrait or became part of the series. That distinction matters: the project attracted interest and opened a route from social exchange to the studio, yet the surviving account does not establish a finished portrait or a particular role for Shriver beyond her interest in the subject.

The mother, the child, and the artist’s uncertainty

The diary gives one concrete studio example on March 23, 1981, when Warhol and Chris Makos photographed a Madonna named Jackie with her baby, described in the entry as a cute little girl and a very pretty baby. Warhol compared Jackie to a beautiful version of Viva, adding that she looked more like Viva’s sisters. The comparison locates the mother’s appearance within Warhol’s existing social and visual world: rather than describing her only through the sacred role implied by Madonna, he also measured her against a recognizable contemporary personality and her family resemblance.

The entry does not describe the image’s composition, the mother’s own account of posing, or the eventual fate of the photographs. Instead, its details make the sitting visible as a working encounter: a named mother, an infant, and Warhol’s quick appraisal of resemblance and beauty. The project’s title invokes an inherited religious image, but the diary’s attention falls on particular bodies and faces. Its modernity is registered through that movement between an iconic role and a contemporary sitter.

Four days later, Warhol noted that another Madonna-and-child sitting was scheduled and predicted that the series would be a problem. He called the subject too strange, specifying mothers, babies, and breastfeeding. This is the clearest account of his hesitation. The subject was not simply an attractive variation on celebrity portraiture: it brought intimate maternal imagery into the studio and made him unsure how to proceed. The diary records the discomfort without resolving it, leaving the project suspended between continued appointments and uncertainty about what the pictures should become.

Portraits as constructed images

Modern Madonnas belonged to a wider portrait practice that Warhol developed through a precise sequence of photographic selection and silkscreen production. For a sitting, he took approximately sixty Polaroids with a Big Shot camera, selected four photographs to be made into positive images on eight-by-ten-inch acetates, and then chose one image. He decided how to crop it and cosmetically altered the subject’s features, lengthening necks, trimming noses, enlarging lips, or clearing complexions. The chosen image was enlarged to a forty-by-forty-inch acetate, from which the screen printer made a silkscreen. The diary does not itemize this procedure for Jackie’s sitting, but it establishes the method within which Warhol’s portrait commissions and projects operated.

The painted canvas was prepared in advance. Assistants painted rolls in one of two background shades: a flesh tone for men and a pinker flesh tone for women. Warhol transferred the enlarged image onto the canvas, painted selected areas such as hair, eyes, lips, ties, and jackets, and aligned the silkscreen with those colors. Slight differences in registration produced the shifting appearance characteristic of his portraits. In the context of Modern Madonnas, this procedure underscores the distance between the apparent immediacy of a mother and child and the deliberate construction of the finished image: the sitter’s likeness passed through selection, cropping, cosmetic adjustment, color, and printing.

This process also belonged to a commercial portrait business. Warhol’s commissioned portraits supplied a major share of his annual income, and his studio maintained a steady flow of work. The broader practice included portraits made for television: in 1980, an ABC Omnibus segment followed Carly Simon having her portrait painted by Warhol, Larry Rivers, and Marisol, with the arrangement contracted and payment discussed in advance. That broadcast was not identified as part of Modern Madonnas, but it shows how portrait-making could connect studio work to public presentation and paid commissions. The Madonna project, by contrast, is recorded through its particular theme and the uncertainty it generated.

A sacred image within a contemporary portrait world

Warhol’s magazine and portrait activities formed a larger setting for Modern Madonnas. Interview had become a source of new faces and celebrity access, and its promise of a place in the magazine helped draw people into his orbit. Alongside that activity, commissioned portraits extended his practice beyond the famous screen icons associated with his earlier work. Modern Madonnas brought a distinct subject into this portrait culture: women with infants, framed through an image traditionally associated with motherhood and sanctity, but encountered in the diary as living sitters whose appearance Warhol assessed and photographed.

The surviving entries show the project advancing through social interest and studio appointments, but they do not establish how many portraits were completed, whether Shriver ultimately participated, or how the series was exhibited. What they do reveal is a productive contrast: Warhol could describe a mother and child through beauty and resemblance, while also admitting that maternal intimacy felt strange as artistic material. Modern Madonnas thus occupies an unsettled place in his portrait work—not just a title, but a continuing negotiation between a familiar cultural image, the particular people before the camera, and the artist’s unease about representing them.