New York City Ballet

New York City Ballet emerges in Andy Warhol’s diary not through a history of its repertory or administration, but through encounters that bring its performances, people, and artistic requests into view. The company is at once a stage to watch, a group to photograph, and a client considering Warhol for a curtain and poster. Across these episodes, ballet becomes a working relationship as well as a social world: a place where artistic decisions, access, and personal tensions meet.

Performances and Access

Warhol’s engagement with the company begins in the diary as a spectator’s experience. After going to church, he accepts Paige Powell’s offer to take him to the ballet. The program includes George Balanchine’s “Symphony in C,” which he has not seen for years, followed by two ballets by Jerome Robbins. He watches Jock Soto and Heather Watts dance, describing them as moving with striking lightness. The performance leads to a practical opportunity: Warhol is told he may photograph the company for as long as he wishes, and he plans to begin.

That permission shifts his position from audience member to potential observer and image-maker. The diary does not describe a completed photographic project, so the offer remains an opening rather than a documented body of work. Even so, the episode shows how attendance at a performance can lead directly to a new form of access. The company is not only something Warhol watches from his seat; its members and organizers can invite him to look again through a camera.

The company’s presence also reaches beyond the theater. Warhol attends a ballet lunch at the office with Paige, where Anne Bass is expected alongside Peter Martins, Heather Watts, Ulrik Trojaborg, and Bruce Padgett. In another entry, Paige arranges dinner at Indochine with New York City Ballet people to discuss the curtain they want Warhol to design. These meetings place the proposed commission among ordinary appointments and meals, showing how the organization’s artistic business is conducted through direct conversation and personal introductions as well as through performances.

The Curtain and the Artistic Brief

The clearest account of the company’s request comes at the ballet lunch. Warhol records that the group wants him to design a curtain and a poster. He immediately considers whether he should have directed the organizers to Fred Hughes, an indication that he does not treat the invitation as an automatic commitment. The question is not simply whether he can accept the work; it is whether the project belongs with him and what sort of design the company actually wants.

Peter Martins brings a small gold Noguchi lion medallion to show him. Warhol doubts that he can do anything with that particular object. If the company wants a design based on the medallion, he thinks Noguchi should make it; if it wants Warhol’s own contribution, the result should be more American. His response distinguishes between reproducing or adapting another artist’s existing idea and making a design that has a clear identity of its own. The exchange gives the commission a concrete artistic problem: the brief must be clarified before Warhol can decide what he should contribute.

The discussion continues after the lunch. At a dinner arranged by Paige with members of the company, the curtain is again the reason for bringing the group together. Later, Ulrik Trojaborg comes by specifically to talk about the work. Warhol notes that the curtain is due soon and that he has to start working on it. The sequence moves from an initial request and an unresolved design question to a deadline. The diary records the pressure of an approaching commitment, but does not describe the finished curtain or poster.

Dancers, Organizers, and Social Tensions

The diary presents New York City Ballet as a community with distinct personal histories and ambitions. At a retirement party arranged by John Gruen and Jane Wilson for Ulrik Trojaborg, who is moving to an executive position at the company, Warhol notices how friendly the guests are with one another. He also feels outside that easy familiarity. Within the same gathering, Heather Watts says, in front of Peter Martins, that she is tired of waiting seventeen years for him to give her a band. The remark makes visible a long-running professional frustration within the social occasion, without explaining its resolution.

Other entries show the company’s people moving through overlapping professional and social settings. At dinner with the ballet group, Paige, Peter Martins, and Jock Soto become involved when a man at the bar directs hostile remarks toward Stephen Sprouse and Paige confronts him. Peter Martins and Soto step in to support Paige, and Warhol fears the dispute could put the gathered company members at risk. The diary recounts the episode as an alarming interruption to dinner, not as an event involving the company’s artistic work. It nevertheless shows how close the dancers and their associates are in Warhol’s account: a threat to one person quickly draws others into the situation.

The Company in Warhol’s Diary

These entries give New York City Ballet a double presence. It is an artistic institution, represented by performances, dancers, and a prospective stage design, but it is also a set of relationships through which work becomes possible. Paige connects Warhol to performances and meals; Anne Bass and Peter Martins appear in the discussions around the commission; Trojaborg follows up as the deadline approaches. Permission to photograph, a proposed curtain, and a poster each mark a different kind of access to the company.

The record remains partial. It establishes Warhol’s admiration for particular performances and his interest in photographing the dancers, then follows the curtain project from its initial proposal to the pressure of a near deadline. It also preserves disagreements, social distance, and a tense dinner rather than smoothing the company into a single image of artistic harmony. New York City Ballet therefore appears through the specific encounters that draw Warhol into its orbit: the theater seat, the design conversation, the approaching due date, and the people whose professional and private lives intersect around the institution.