Warhol’s Athletes series

Warhol’s Athletes series placed sports figures within his expanding practice of commissioned portraiture. Organized by Richard Weisman, the project divided the resulting portraits among the collector, the market, and the athletes themselves. Accounts of sessions with jockey Willie Shoemaker and hockey player Rod Gilbert reveal both the series’ practical arrangements and the intimate, sometimes comic encounters behind its images.

Commission and Circulation

Weisman commissioned a series of athletes’ portraits, with an arrangement that gave him some of the works, made others available for sale, and allowed the athletes to keep some. Willie Shoemaker was the first sitter. The arrangement connected portraiture to several kinds of ownership at once: a collector assembled works, buyers could acquire them, and the people depicted were not simply subjects left outside the circulation of their own images.

The project belonged to a broader shift in Warhol’s portrait practice. Commissions had become a major source of income, and people who brought in portrait clients could earn a commission themselves. The series therefore joined artistic production to a working business in which subjects, intermediaries, and collectors all had a part. Its athletes were not only famous figures to be pictured; their portraits were also commissioned objects with an intended path beyond the studio.

Making the Portraits

Warhol’s general portrait procedure gives the project a material context. A sitter posed for about sixty Polaroid photographs, taken with a Polaroid Big Shot camera. Warhol selected four images for a screen printer to turn into positive images on eight-by-ten-inch acetates. From these he chose a single image, determined its crop, and retouched it to make the sitter appear more attractive, altering features such as the neck, nose, lips, and complexion. The selected image was then enlarged to a forty-by-forty-inch acetate, from which the printer made a silkscreen.

The canvas was prepared through a separate sequence. Assistants painted rolls of canvas in advance, using one flesh tone for men’s portraits and a pinker shade for women’s. Warhol traced the enlarged image onto the prepared surface with carbon transfer paper, painted selected areas such as hair and eyes, and then had the photographic details screened over the painted colors. Slight misalignments between the screen and the underlying painted areas produced the portraits’ characteristic shifting appearance. The stated prices for Warhol’s portraits were approximately $25,000 for the first canvas and $5,000 for each additional one, a cost structure that made the production of multiples part of the commission from the outset.

Shoemaker and the First Sitting

Shoemaker’s session took place in Fred’s room amid the bustle of people preparing for the Academy Awards. Warhol went there at four o’clock to photograph the jockey, but Shoemaker did not arrive until after five. His wife had come up to the room without him; he had been in court getting a divorce from her, which explained his delay. The portrait appointment thus opened not with a composed image but with an interruption from the sitter’s private life.

The diary dwells on the soon-to-be former couple’s awkward proximity. Shoemaker’s wife dressed him for the picture, while he appeared to Warhol like a child beside her. She asked him to go out with her to celebrate the divorce, and he refused. The details give the sitting an unexpected tension: the portrait required Shoemaker to pose, but the scene around the pose was governed by a relationship ending that very day. The series’ polished images began in circumstances that were anything but still.

Gilbert and the Sitter’s Public Identity

On another day, hockey player Rod Gilbert came to be photographed for the series. Warhol noticed that Gilbert had many scars on his face, though he could not really see them. That gap between a notable physical detail and its limited visibility in the encounter echoes the larger transformation involved in portraiture: a sitter’s appearance passed through the photographer’s attention and selection rather than simply transferring itself unchanged to the image.

The meeting also became an exchange. Gilbert autographed a hockey stick for Warhol, who signed copies of The Philosophy of Andy Warhol for him. Warhol made a mistake and inscribed one book to Ron instead of Rod. The small error punctures the formality of the artist-and-athlete encounter, while the exchanged objects show each man offering the other a portable piece of his public identity. Together with Shoemaker’s unsettled sitting, Gilbert’s visit makes the series legible not only as a set of commissioned images but as a record of encounters in which the process of turning a person into a portrait remained social, contingent, and fallible.