Shadow Paintings

Shadow Paintings are a series of close-up works based on photographs of intimate anatomy. In the diary, they emerge not through an exhibition or a formal account of their production, but through the Polaroids and canvases that circulated in Andy Warhol’s workplace—and through the distress their subject matter caused Jed Johnson.

Subjects and Photographs

Warhol described the works as close-ups of male genitals and anuses. The people he referred to as Landscapes had posed for the paintings, linking the bodily images to a photographic encounter with their subjects. The diary records stacks of Polaroids made for the series, but does not specify a complete sequence from photograph to finished canvas.

The series appears alongside Warhol’s other photographic work without being confused with it. While preparing to photograph Chris Evert for the Athletes series, he showed Victor the Shadow Paintings. The contrast is striking: a commissioned sports portrait session occupied the same working world as paintings derived from intimate bodily close-ups.

The Works in the Studio

During the visit, Victor began pulling out the Shadow Paintings. Someone intervened and told him not to continue. The diary gives no further explanation of the warning, but the moment shows that displaying the works in the studio could itself become a matter of discretion. Their presence was not simply an abstract artistic choice; the images could be exposed, handled, and encountered in the middle of ordinary work.

The following November, the Polaroids were still present in Warhol’s working area. Jed Johnson saw stacks of them and reacted angrily, accusing Warhol of having sunk to a low level by spending time on such material. He left visibly upset, and Warhol recorded that the encounter ruined his afternoon. The conflict arose not from a public reception of the finished paintings, but from Johnson’s discovery of the photographs and what they disclosed about Warhol’s work.

Intimacy and Conflict

The diary preserves two different kinds of exposure: the close-up images themselves and the private studio materials from which the project was understood. The Polaroids made the series’ subject matter immediate to Johnson, turning an artistic activity into a point of personal dispute. Warhol’s account records his own distress at Johnson’s reaction, while offering no reconciliation or final judgment about the works.

Shadow Paintings therefore occupy a revealing place in this account of Warhol’s working life. They sit beside commissioned image-making, yet their intimate subject matter unsettles the boundary between professional production and private response. The surviving scenes establish the series through its photographs, its appearance in the studio, and the rupture it helped bring into focus between Warhol and Johnson.