Zurich enters Andy Warhol’s diary as a working stop rather than a conventional travel destination. On February 10 and 11, 1980, the Dolder Grand Hotel served as his base for two commissioned portrait sittings, and the surrounding entries record the people, judgments, and practical arrangements that accumulated around the work. One appointment took him to a small, plainly furnished home; another involved a beautiful woman and her husband. The contrast made Zurich a revealing setting for Warhol’s portrait business: a place where the appearance of wealth could not be read easily, and where a commissioned image joined personal presentation to the careful work of photographic selection and production.

A Working Base at the Dolder Grand

On February 10, Bruno Bischofberger woke Warhol and Fred Hughes at the Dolder Grand Hotel at 11:30 a.m. He was waiting to take them to Warhol’s first portrait job. The diary presents the hotel not through an account of its amenities but as the point from which the day’s work began. Zurich is organized around appointments and movement between sites: the hotel, a client’s home, and, the following day, another portrait sitting.

The first home sharply contradicted Warhol’s assumptions about what a portrait client could afford. He described it as a small house that reminded him of one on the Lower East Side. A mother and three children lived there; the children wore corduroy pants and torn shirts, the furniture looked old and worn, and the room offered no obvious signs of affluence. Fred noticed that one child was especially cute, but Warhol did not. When Fred asked for orange juice, the household served it from a can. The details that made the home seem modest were exactly what left Warhol unable to understand how the family could pay for a portrait.

Warhol’s uncertainty did not prevent him from responding generously in thought: he wanted to give them the portrait for free. The family seemed very nice to him, but their apparent circumstances and the cost of the commission did not fit together. Bischofberger answered that Swiss people concealed their money. The diary records this as an explanation offered during the visit, not as proof of the family’s finances; the unresolved gap between what the home displayed and what its occupants could afford is part of what made the appointment memorable.

Two Portrait Sittings

The second sitting, on February 11, began after Warhol had slept late. Thomas Ammann woke him for the appointment. This time the subject was a woman whom Warhol regarded as exceptionally beautiful, accompanied by her husband, whom he described in contrast as fat. He told her she did not need makeup and found her easy to photograph because she was, in his words, a raving beauty. The encounter thus differed from the previous day’s: instead of puzzling over a client’s apparent resources, Warhol emphasized how readily the sitter’s appearance presented itself to his camera.

The husband, Warhol noted, told his wife she was ugly. Ammann characterized this as a Swiss way of treating wives, supposedly to prevent them from becoming too secure. This is the men’s interpretation as recorded in the diary, not an independent account of the couple’s relationship. The episode nevertheless places judgments about beauty and confidence inside the portrait appointment itself: Warhol’s work depended on constructing an image of the sitter, while the conversation around her included a conflicting judgment from her husband.

After the sitting, Warhol and his companions gave the couple a book and an issue of Interview, and sent out the film. The practical note about supplies gives the Zurich work a material dimension: Warhol found it difficult to obtain anything there but SX-70 film, as other film was being phased out. Even a portrait commission that seemed straightforward depended on photographic materials and on sending the exposed film onward for the next stages of production.

The Portrait as a Made Image

The diary’s Zurich appointments sit within a larger, carefully controlled portrait method. Warhol began by photographing a sitter with Polaroid’s Big Shot camera, usually taking about sixty pictures. He selected four images for a screen printer to turn into positive images on eight-by-ten-inch acetates. From those, he chose one, decided how to crop it, and altered features to make the subject appear more attractive, adjusting such details as the neck, nose, lips, or complexion. The chosen image was then enlarged to a forty-by-forty-inch acetate, from which a silkscreen was made.

The canvas, too, was prepared in advance. Assistants painted rolls of canvas in flesh-toned backgrounds, using one shade for men’s portraits and a pinker one for women’s. Warhol traced the enlarged image onto the canvas, painted colored areas such as hair, eyes, lips, ties, and jackets, and then aligned the silkscreen with those painted areas. Small discrepancies in alignment created the characteristic shifting effect of the finished portraits. This process helps explain why the Zurich entries treat the camera, the sitter’s appearance, and the film as distinct parts of a job: the portrait was not simply a likeness made at one sitting, but an image shaped through selection, retouching, transfer, and printing.

Lunch, Conversation, and Social Context

After the second sitting, Warhol, Loulou de la Falaise, her husband Thadée, and Ammann had lunch in the restaurant downstairs. The diary notes that they signed for the meal, that the food was good, and that they were alone in a beautiful room overlooking the lake and mountains. The weather had shifted from morning hail to sunshine beating through the window onto their backs. These observations make the restaurant a brief pause between appointments and a place where the day’s professional schedule opened into conversation.

Loulou spoke about Yves Saint Laurent, describing his talent and the strain his depressed moods placed on his office. She said that she maintained a cheerful manner even when she felt otherwise, and spoke of the personal cost of sustaining it. She also discussed her stepfather, John McKendry, and his disillusionment with aristocratic life. In her account, he had imagined the aristocracy as romantic and literary; after marrying a countess and meeting prominent people through his work at the Met, he found them ordinary. Warhol privately attributed part of McKendry’s distress to Maxime de la Falaise, but did not voice that judgment to Loulou.

The Zurich entries therefore place portrait labor beside a social world of fashion, art, family histories, and money. Their focus remains particular: a hotel wake-up, two clients, scarce film, a signed lunch bill, and conversation at a table overlooking the lake and mountains. Together, these details show the city as a temporary work setting in which Warhol’s image-making continued while his diary registered the discrepancies between appearance and means, beauty and criticism, and social glamour and private strain.