Piss Paintings

Piss Paintings turned urine from a bodily by-product into a deliberately managed studio material. Andy Warhol’s diary records the process not as a single provocation but as a sequence of choices about who would contribute, how the liquid would reach a surface, what color it produced, and how the resulting works might be displayed. The entries preserve both the series’ comic material facts and its encounter with a more conventional question of artistic currency: whether the method was still new.

Material and Method

On June 28, 1977, Warhol described painting in the back of the office with a sponge mop while Interview held a lunch for Schenley’s liquor representatives. The contrast is characteristic of the project’s setting: ordinary office business continued while an unconventional studio procedure took place nearby. Warhol noted that he himself had not urinated on any canvases that week, then explained that the canvases were for Piss Paintings. The work was therefore tracked through a routine of production, not treated as a single isolated stunt.

Warhol also recruited Ronnie to supply material. Because Ronnie took a great deal of vitamin B, Warhol expected his urine to turn the canvas a particularly pretty color. He instructed him to hold it in the morning until he reached the office, making the timing of an ordinary bodily act part of the studio process. Warhol even sent Ronnie out for photo supplies costing $5.95, a small administrative detail that places the experiment among the day’s work rather than outside it. Color, scheduling, and errands all belonged to the practical life of the series.

The method was not restricted to Warhol’s own contribution. On June 29, Victor returned from Fire Island with samples of his own. Warhol proposed that Victor begin making them on sheets and bring them in, with the two of them exhibiting together in Victor’s loft: Victor’s Come paintings alongside Warhol’s Piss Paintings. The proposal made the bodily source of each body of work explicit while placing them in a shared exhibition plan. It also shows the project opening into collaboration, with the surface and the contributor both treated as parts of the work’s identity.

Collaboration and Display

A later entry records Victor urinating on drawings for Warhol. That incident offers a distinct form of participation from the earlier plan for Victor to make his own works on sheets: here, Victor acted directly on drawings made for Warhol. The diary does not specify the drawings’ final appearance or whether they became part of a finished exhibition. It does, however, document the transfer of the process from Warhol’s canvases to works touched by another person, making collaboration a material event rather than merely an idea for a joint show.

The display plans grew more ambitious in the fall of 1978. Doug Christmas wanted to show the Piss Paintings in Paris after a trip to Denmark, so Warhol concluded that he would need to drink more water and produce additional works. He said he could make two a day. The prospective exhibition thus changed the tempo of production: a proposed destination overseas meant making enough pieces to present a body of work, not simply continuing an occasional experiment. The diary gives no confirmation that the Paris show took place, so it remains a plan rather than a recorded outcome.

Fred Hughes recommended putting two paintings together because they looked more interesting that way. This suggestion shifted attention from how an individual work was made to how works might operate in relation to one another. The series could be shaped not only by the liquid and the canvas but by grouping. Warhol’s ability to make two paintings a day, Fred’s advice about pairs, and the prospect of a Paris presentation together reveal a production and display logic developing around the material experiment.

Novelty and Artistic Judgment

The series also met an immediate challenge to its claim on novelty. When Warhol discussed Piss Paintings with Salvador Dalí, Dalí called the idea old-fashioned because it had already appeared in the film Teorema. Warhol acknowledged that this was true and that he knew it. The exchange complicates any account of the works as simply an outrageous invention: their bodily material could provoke attention, but another artist could also place the gesture within an existing artistic or cinematic history.

Warhol’s account of Dalí is not a simple dismissal. He regarded him as ahead in some respects and behind in others, and recorded the criticism without disputing its basis. The moment makes artistic value a matter of timing as well as method: an act that seems startling in the studio may already have a precedent elsewhere. Dalí’s response therefore places the series in conversation with older avant-garde gestures, while Warhol’s continued production and plans for exhibition show that the question of precedent did not end the project.

Production and Revision

In October, Warhol noted that he might try brushing the urine onto the Piss Paintings. The tentative phrasing matters: the diary records a possible change in technique, not a confirmed adoption of it. Brushing would have made application more controlled and mediated than the bodily act described in the earlier entries. The possibility nevertheless shows Warhol treating the procedure as adjustable, with the method itself open to experimentation rather than fixed once the series had begun.

Across these entries, Piss Paintings develops through a series of concrete decisions: a sponge mop in the office, Ronnie’s vitamin-B-colored contribution, Victor’s samples and intervention on drawings, a proposed joint show in Victor’s loft, a possible Paris exhibition, paired presentation, and the idea of applying urine with a brush. The project’s significance in the diary lies partly in this movement between bodily action and artistic organization. What begins as an unusual studio material becomes something to schedule, produce in quantity, arrange, exhibit, and reconsider—while remaining vulnerable to the pointed question of whether its central gesture is already old.