Park Avenue Armory serves in Andy Warhol’s diary as a venue where spectacle and commerce meet. A lavish Cartier celebration filled the space with airplanes to honor the aviation history of the Santos Dumont wristwatch; at another time, an antiques fair there gave Warhol occasion to dismiss much of the American folk art he had once collected.

A Venue for Public Gatherings

The Armory enters the diary through events that draw people across different social and cultural circles. It hosted a major Cartier party and an antiques fair, shifting in these accounts from a stage for a high-budget celebration to a place where visitors examined and judged objects. The diary does not describe the building in architectural terms; its significance comes instead from what people assembled there to do.

The Cartier Celebration

Cartier president Ralph Destino gave a party at the Armory to mark the anniversary of the Santos Dumont wristwatch, whose association with aviation shaped the event’s staging. Airplanes were brought into the space because the watch had been invented for a pilot. The celebration reportedly cost about $100,000, but Warhol judged that the spectacle failed to work. The expense and scale therefore did not guarantee the effect its organizers sought.

The party brought together celebrities and prominent guests, including Truman Capote and Rudolf Nureyev. Cartier distributed eight watches, each valued at $1,300 and said to have cost the company $600. The watches themselves became part of the evening’s social theater: Paulette Goddard, wearing what Warhol estimated to be $3 million in ruby jewelry, chose the men’s watch rather than the women’s version. The Armory’s aviation-themed setting thus framed a celebration in which costly objects, celebrity attendance, and the performance of taste were all on display.

The Antiques Fair

In September 1979, Warhol walked to the Armory to meet Marina Schiano, who was visiting an antiques fair there with Jed Johnson. Warhol paid admission, then encountered Bishop, the director of the folk-art museum responsible for the fair and a trustee colleague whom he said disliked his collection. The meeting sharpened Warhol’s own change of taste: he said he no longer cared for American primitive art, describing its painted objects, toys, dolls, carousel pieces, and baskets as looking like junk. In this episode, the Armory is less a backdrop for celebrity spectacle than a marketplace of cultural judgment, where Warhol’s view of collecting had shifted even as he remained connected to the museum world.