“I think eventually people competed to be portrayed by Warhol because that appeared to give them instant immortality of the sort usually enjoyed only by the greatest of stars or the most celebrated products, as if they were also part of the common consciousness of the time.”
Arthur C. Danto, “Art,” The Nation, April 3, 1989, p.461.
“Bob had asked Andy Warhol to do a portrait, which sort of frightened me, naturally, because one never knew what Andy would do. So he said, “Don’t worry, everything will be splendid.” So I had great visions of going to Richard Avedon.
He came up for me that day, and he said, “All right, we’re off.”
And I said, “Well, where are we going?”
“Just down to Forty-second Street and Broadway.”
I said, “What are we going to do there?”
He said, “I’m going to take pictures of you.”
I said, “For what?”
He said, “For the portrait.”
I said, “In those things? My God, I’ll look terrible!”
He said, “Don’t worry,” and he took out coins. He had about a hundred dollars’ worth of silver coins, and he said, “We’ll take the high key and the low key, and I’ll push you inside, and you watch the little red light.”The thing you do the passport with, three for a quarter, or something like that.
He said, “Just watch the red light,” and I froze. I watched the red light and never did anything. So Andy would come in and poke me and make me do all kinds of things, and I relaxed finally. I think the whole place, wherever we were, thought they had two nuts there. We were running from one booth to another, and he took all these pictures, and they were drying all over the place.
At the end of the thing, he said, “Now, you want to see them?”And they were so sensational that he didn’t need Richard Avedon. I was so pleased; I think I’ll go there for all my pictures from now on.
When he delivered the portrait, it came in pieces, and Bob said to him, “How would you like...don’t you want to sit down at this, too?” because there were all these beautiful colors.
He said, “Oh no.The man who’s up here to put it together, let him do it any way he wants.”
“But, Andy, this is your portrait.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
So he sat in the library, and we did it. Then, of course, he did come in and did give it a critical eye. “Well, I do think this should be here and that should be there.”When it was all finished, he said, “It really doesn’t matter. It’s just so marvelous. But you could change it any way you want.”
What I liked about it mostly was that it was a portrait of being alive and not like those candy box things, which I detest, and never ever wanted as a portrait of myself.
Ethel Scull, Warhol friend and collector on her portrait, Emile De Antonio and Mitch Tuchman, Painters Painting: A Candid History of the Modern Art Scene, 1940-1970 Abbeville Press (New York: 1984), p.123-24.
“If there were a portrait commission, we'd have a lunch. It was fun and helped to relax people who were nervous about having their portrait done . . . You never knew who was going to be at lunch. You could have a pop star, if it was somebody very famous, we wouldn't say that they were coming, we would tone down the lunch. I heard later that people were a little intimidated about coming to lunch . . . We had impromptu things happen, like when Georgia O'Keeffe came to get her portrait, I was videotaping Paloma Picasso and John Richardson, so by chance I also taped Georgia O'Keeffe and Paloma talking about Paloma's father. Once I was taping a lunch, and Rupert brought John Lennon in while Andy was photographing Liza Minelli. Not every day at 860 was exciting, but you had many times where great people came in that you wouldn't normally have a chance to really talk to. Andy was the whole reason for it being such a center of energy.
Vincent Fremont on The Factory lunches, quote for web project One Stop Warhol Shop, 2000.