Pop art in the diaries

Pop art in the diaries is not simply a settled style from the past: it is a working method, a source of income, and a recurring question about whether familiar images can still matter. Andy Warhol’s daily record moves between the production of celebrity portraits, the social world of Interview, and his anxiety that repeating the images associated with his earlier work might make him seem out of date. Its central tension is practical as much as artistic: repetition keeps the work recognizable and marketable, even as Warhol worries that recognition may have hardened into formula.

A continuing public life

From 1975, Interview became a major source of activity for Warhol. After buying out Peter Brant and becoming the magazine’s owner and publisher, he took a more direct role in its operation, looking over art director Marc Balet’s layouts and arranging lunches with prospective advertisers. The magazine also brought new people to the office. As the possibilities for making films narrowed, Interview offered an ongoing reason for young people and celebrities to come into Warhol’s orbit. Its social energy helped keep him connected to contemporary culture rather than being treated as a figure belonging only to the 1960s.

By 1976, the magazine had developed a glamorous, knowingly self-mocking style, and celebrities wanted to appear in it. Warhol’s promise of a place in the magazine took the place of his earlier promise of a part in a film. Its pages presented newly photographed young men and women under headings such as Interman and Viewgirl, making the discovery and display of fresh faces part of the publication’s appeal. Pop’s circulation thus extended beyond paintings: the magazine turned attention, personality, and the photographic image into recurring public material.

The diaries also register how that image-making could change from one setting to another. During an Interview encounter with Shaun Cassidy, Warhol found the interview constrained by the need to keep the subject’s answers suitable for his young fans. In the hotel lobby, Cassidy insisted that being an idol did not change a person; among screaming fans, and then in the limousine, Warhol observed a marked shift in his manner. Later, as Barry McKinley photographed him, Cassidy seemed to become absorbed in his own image. The episode makes celebrity less a fixed identity than a performance shaped by audience, camera, and occasion.

The portrait as a production system

Commissioned portraits joined artistic work to the business that supported Warhol’s practice. Friends, employees, and dealers who brought him a commission received a fee, while portraits of private or non-show-business subjects extended the logic of his earlier celebrity images. Ronnie Cutrone described this development against a moment when Pop art had been declared over and new movements had appeared: Warhol still had an office to run and a magazine that needed support. The commissioned portrait made people outside show business comparable, in a certain sense, to the famous figures already turned into icons. The diaries show this format continuing as an important source of income alongside gallery and museum work.

The process began with a sitting and approximately sixty Polaroid photographs, taken with a Polaroid Big Shot. After that camera model was discontinued, Warhol arranged to buy the manufacturer’s remaining unused stock. He selected four images for his silkscreen printer, who made positive images on eight-by-ten-inch acetates. Warhol chose one, determined the crop, and altered the image to improve the sitter’s appearance: necks could be lengthened, noses trimmed, lips enlarged, and complexions cleared. The portrait was therefore not a transparent record of a face but a deliberately adjusted likeness, shaped to present its subject attractively.

The selected image was enlarged from an eight-by-ten-inch acetate to a forty-by-forty-inch one, from which the printer produced a silkscreen. Meanwhile, assistants prepared rolls of canvas in advance, using one flesh-toned background for men and a pinker shade for women. Warhol transferred the image onto the painted canvas, added color to features such as hair, eyes, lips, ties, and jackets, and aligned the finished screen with those painted areas. Small variations in registration created the portraits’ characteristic shifting appearance. The prices recorded for the format—about $25,000 for the first canvas and $5,000 for each additional one—make the process’s conjunction of reproducible image and commissioned luxury explicit.

Individual sittings reveal how much the camera could complicate the promise of a likeness. When Warhol photographed Sylvester Stallone, he used ten rolls of film because, as he noted, Stallone was difficult to photograph: his neck, chest, and hands seemed to change dramatically between front and side views. Warhol compared the effect to a rubber man. The session, including the decision to have Stallone remove his shirt, turns portraiture into a negotiation between a body and the angles through which it can be made visible. The final image depended on selection and construction, not on a single self-evident view.

Familiar images and the fear of repetition

In 1981, Warhol’s notes repeatedly frame the return to earlier Pop imagery as a test. Looking through a book of his old paintings, he saw the cleverness of his earlier work but felt unable to think of anything equally clever in the present; he considered doing Soup Cans again. Around the same time, Chris Makos told him that Julian Schnabel was prominent and that Abstract Expressionism was returning. Makos offered to bring him a can of Won Ton soup with distinctive lettering, a concrete prompt that connected a current object to the familiar Campbell’s Soup Cans motif without resolving Warhol’s uncertainty about what to make of it.

The anxiety sharpened as Warhol worked on images of the Wicked Witch and Howdy Doody, while Rupert Smith brought him Mickey Mouse and Greta Garbo images. Warhol anticipated criticism that, twenty years later, he was doing the same things again. The concern was not only about artistic originality: the planned exhibition also depended on financial support from a gallery, and Warhol resented the arrangement as publicity for the gallery that did not pay enough. Repetition here carries two pressures at once—the fear of being judged stale and the practical need to make and exhibit work within commercial arrangements.

Before another show, Warhol compared his own situation with the Rolling Stones, whose recent reviews were glowing despite their having repeated the sound of an earlier album. The comparison exposes the contradiction at the center of his worry: revisiting an established style could be criticized as exhausted, yet repetition could also be received as successful continuity. When his first superstar, Naomi Levine, called about the exhibition, their exchange fell into the hesitant language of the 1960s. The return of that dialogue made the past feel present, but also underlined how easily an earlier artistic identity could become a script.

Exhibition, commerce, and recurrence

Warhol’s later work did not consist only of reviving old motifs. In 1980, he agreed to participate in a television segment about Carly Simon having her portrait painted by him, Larry Rivers, and Marisol. He had insisted on payment for further work, and Vincent Fremont negotiated a contract under which Simon would cover most of the cost. The episode places the commissioned portrait within a new media setting: the process itself became television material, while payment remained an explicit condition of participation.

The record’s January 1982 entry brings the themes of return, display, and professional visibility together in a double opening: Dollar Signs at Castelli Gallery on Greene Street and Reversals at its West Broadway location. Warhol described the crowded openings as reminiscent of a busy day in the 1960s, and noted the artists and visitors gathered there. He chose the stairs as a vantage point from which he could see people and sign things. The scene gives repetition a public, social form: familiar artistic work returned not in isolation, but amid openings, encounters, signatures, and the continuing circulation of Warhol’s image.

Across these episodes, Pop art remains both recognizable and unsettled. The diaries show its techniques made concrete in photographs, retouched acetates, prepared canvases, and silkscreens; its subjects move between celebrities, private clients, and popular images; and its continued public life depends on magazines, commissions, exhibitions, and television. Warhol’s unease about doing the same work again does not disappear. Instead, it becomes part of the story of how Pop imagery persists—repeated, modified, sold, and reconsidered in the very act of being brought back.