Paloma Picasso

Paloma Picasso emerges in Andy Warhol’s diaries through a carefully staged Interview feature that becomes more than a conventional sit-down: she talks over dinner, proposes continuing the conversation among works at the Museum of Modern Art, and signs an autograph for a visitor before returning to her work at Tiffany’s. The record presents her as an open, engaged interview subject and shows how celebrity visibility could be made through conversation, public appearances, and the settings that surrounded a person’s work.

An Interview at Quo Vadis

On June 28, 1980, Andy Warhol called Bob Colacello to confirm that an Interview with Paloma Picasso was going ahead. Lester Persky was to conduct it at Quo Vadis. Warhol arrived first, followed by Bob Colacello, Lester Persky, and Picasso. He was dieting and ate melon and arugula; Picasso and Bob Colacello shared chicken. The diary records this meal in ordinary, specific detail, setting the interview within the social routines through which the magazine assembled its subjects.

Warhol’s account characterizes Picasso as someone who tells everything. That impression matters to the shape of the feature: rather than confining the conversation to dinner, she suggested that its closing portion take place while she and Lester Persky walked through the Museum of Modern Art’s Picasso exhibition. The interview thus acquired a second setting and a moving form, with Picasso speaking as the exhibition unfolded around them.

The Museum Conversation

On July 1, Warhol met Bob Colacello, Picasso, and Lester Persky at the museum. The group walked through the exhibition’s three floors as Picasso talked and Lester Persky joked. Warhol found the visit exhausting, but its length also gave the interview room to continue beyond the restaurant table.

A visitor in a wheelchair asked Warhol for his autograph. Warhol redirected the request toward Picasso, and the visitor accepted; she signed first, and Warhol signed afterward. The brief exchange places Picasso not only as the subject of a feature but as a public figure recognized in the museum, sharing the moment of attention with Warhol. They then had to leave because she needed to return to Tiffany’s, where her jewelry was sold. The episode joins the interview to her professional commitments without turning the diary into a fuller account of her career.

Public Interests and Work

The plans for the evening of June 28 also register one of Picasso’s preferences: she liked Patti LuPone, so the group checked whether they could get a table at LuPone’s show at Les Mouches. The entry presents this as a practical extension of the interview gathering, linking Picasso’s stated interest in a performer to the group’s social itinerary.

Her return to Tiffany’s after the museum visit supplies another concrete point in the diary’s portrait of her public life. Picasso appears in these entries through overlapping roles—as a magazine interviewee, a visitor speaking amid an exhibition, and a jewelry designer with work awaiting her—rather than through a sustained biographical account.

Celebrity and Image-Making

Picasso’s feature took place within Interview’s established attraction for celebrities. By 1976 the magazine had become a glamorous publication that public figures wanted to appear in; Andy Warhol often conducted cover interviews himself, and the promise of appearing in the magazine had taken the place of his earlier promise to put people in a film. Picasso’s willingness to speak at dinner and continue the conversation in a museum fits that editorial culture, in which the interview itself could be extended into a public performance across settings.

Warhol’s commissioned portrait practice formed another part of the same broader culture of celebrity images, though the diaries do not identify Picasso as a portrait subject. For a portrait, he took about sixty photographs with a Polaroid Big Shot camera, selected four images for screen printing, then chose and cosmetically altered one before it was enlarged for the canvas. Assistants prepared flesh-toned backgrounds, and slight misalignments between the screened photograph and painted color produced the portraits’ characteristic shifting appearance. The contrast clarifies the different forms of representation recorded here: Picasso’s documented encounter with Warhol was built around her voice and movement through an exhibition, while his portrait process transformed a sitter’s image through selection, retouching, and repeated technical steps.