Toronto

Toronto is the setting for a two-day visit in November 1981 that brings business, celebrity hospitality, and artistic self-doubt into close proximity. The city is presented through Warhol’s diary as a sequence of arrivals, offices, a museum dinner, and a hurried return to New York—not as a detached portrait of urban life, but as a stage on which he measures his public standing against his private anxieties.

Arrival and business hospitality

On November 20, Warhol and his companions crossed into Canada, where customs became an immediate frustration. Conrad Black had sent a limousine, which took Warhol to the Four Seasons Hotel and suite 2910; the room’s view seemed to encompass the whole country. After cleaning up and dressing, Warhol went to Black’s office, a postmodern building with large columns and an old-fashioned switchboard. Black had read Popism the night before. Warhol found him about thirty-seven, pleasant, and reminiscent of Peter Brant, with a family fortune tied to mines, supermarkets, and newspapers.

The visit’s hospitality was carefully staged. Black and his wife, Lisa, hosted a dinner for Warhol at a museum, and a small television crew was present to record the publicity occasion. The crew’s presence took on a different cast when the guests learned that Black owned the television station. Among those expected at dinner were Gaetana Enders and her husband, Tom, an Under-Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs and a former ambassador to Canada. The diary registers the gathering through such contrasts of status and scale, including the marked difference in height between the couple.

The museum dinner and a missed invitation

Before the dinner, Warhol called his New York office because he was trying to secure Jon Gould a place at T. T. Wachtmeister’s party for the king of Sweden. He was told there was no room, a small disappointment that remained active during the Toronto visit. The next day, after returning to New York, he learned that Jon could attend after all; by then Jon was unsure whether he wanted to go. Toronto therefore sits between the initial refusal and the belated invitation, while Warhol’s nervous waiting and coffee-drinking show how much the answer mattered to him.

At the museum dinner, a cardinal recovering from a stroke was asked by Black to say grace. When the cardinal asked about Warhol’s nephew, who was a priest, Warhol answered candidly that the nephew had run away with a Mexican nun. Fred Hughes pulled Warhol aside and reprimanded him for making the remark to the cardinal. The cardinal, however, had heard the exchange and responded warmly: he valued Warhol’s honesty, admired his art, and knew that he went to church every Sunday. The moment reversed Fred’s expectation of offense: what he considered an inappropriate answer became, for the cardinal, a sign of candor and a point of connection.

Art, self-assessment, and departure

The museum tour brought Warhol face to face with a Gauguin-to-Moore exhibition, including roughly forty monumental figures by Henry Moore. He found the sculptures impressive and judged his own work insignificant by comparison. The visit turned public admiration into private pressure: Warhol reflected that he spent his time touring while others worked, feared that he was no longer producing good work, and felt he needed to return to making something. He also noted that he had not drunk much and resolved to stop drinking because he believed it caused weight gain.

On November 21, customs again irritated the party on the Toronto-to-New York journey, and they reached the office by one o’clock. Warhol then prepared for a four o’clock retrospective of prints at Leo Castelli’s Gallery and recorded that he hated the show. The abrupt transition from Toronto’s imposing museum sculptures to dissatisfaction with his own exhibition gives the visit its particular significance: the city’s grand cultural setting did not reassure him about his work; it made the comparison harder to avoid.