Vanity Fair UK - 11.2019

Several years later, after moving to Paris, I

admired Schlumberger’s four Warhol portraits in

pride of place in her salon and would encounter

the equivalent when meeting Hélène Rochas and

dining with Florence Grinda, French Vogue’s society

editor. Small wonder that Bob Colacello, Warhol’s

former employee, referred to him as “the Sargent

of the jet set”. When writing my memoir, After

Andy: Adventures in Warhol Land, I interviewed

von Furstenberg and others, such as the Farah Diba

Pahlavi, Eric de Rothschild and Suzanne Syz, about

their Warhol portrait sessions, all of which began

with a Polaroid. Whereas von Furstenberg was

snapped in the kitchen of her Park Avenue apart-

ment—“he (Andy) needed a white wall”—the former

empress of Iran was painted in the grandeur of the

Niavaran Palace, Tehran. “We’d already met at the

White House at a state dinner given for my husband

by President Ford,” she remembered. “I was excited

to talk to Andy but he kept on running away from

me. He was scared that I was going to ask him to

dance.” Rothschild sat for Warhol in the nude—“I

was inspired by a portrait of Louis XV at Versailles

and he needed $20,000 to ˜nish the ˜lm Trash,”

he says—while the jeweller Suzanne Syz dared to

complain that he had made her look sad. “He was

surprised, I don’t think every sitter was as frank,”

she says. Two weeks later, Warhol did her portrait

in three di™erent colours and gave them all to her.

ountless people have insisted that

Warhol was impossible to commu-

nicate with. Not in my experience.

When initially introduced to him in

1980, he tried to set me up with an

Armani model. “You should meet him,” he said

with a sly smile. It was fairly outrageous. He was

the major artist mentioned in a David Bowie song

(“Andy Warhol”), yet there he was playing cupid to

my 16-year-old self. Accompanied by Fred Hughes,

his business manager, we were having lunch at the

Chester Square home of Marguerite Littman.

Warhol became famous for making high art

out of low art—Campbell soup cans—while his

iconic 1960s portraits of Elvis, Marilyn Monroe and

Elizabeth Taylor created a new language. As the

Pop artist’s career continued, his portraits evolved

into di™erent series including celebrity and society

subjects. Joseph Beuys—a Warhol subject himself—

claimed that “if the ˜rst half of the 20th century

belonged to Picasso, the second half belonged to

Warhol.” Certainly, his prices have soared. A

Triple Elvis portrait went for $400,000 in 1987

but now goes for $81 million—or it did at Christie’s

Contemporary Sale in November 2014—and the

Italian collector Annibale Berlingieri privately sold

his Eight Elvises for $100 million in 2008. Accord-

ing to Katharine Arnold (the co-head of Christie’s

Post-War and Contemporary Art in London), “the

1980s society portraits have appreciated.”

Regarding his career, it was so obvious that

Warhol was one of those geniuses who was

motivated by curiosity and instinct, as opposed

to a “mighty me” ego. There was genuine won-

derment. Colacello, his biographer, referred to

him as “the Matisse of Acrylic Paint”. He was. To

quote Jacques Grange, France’s leading interior

designer, Warhol was “an exceptional colourist”

but there was also “the freshness of the work”. In

the opinion of Sir Norman Rosenthal, who curated

a show of his portraits at the Ashmolean Museum in

Oxford in 2016, “his magic comes down to honesty”.

Katharine Arnold mentions the importance of

Warhol’s Catalogue Raisonné, §irst published

in 2002. “It gives a sense of how handcrafted

and premeditated his work was,” she says. And

like many, von Furstenberg views the artist as

prophet-like. “Andy guessed and predicted it all,”

she says, “the era of fame, icons, branding.”

From the late 1970s onwards, Warhol was over-

looked by the American art world. “Unlike his

contemporaries Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper

Johns, Andy was a swish gay,” says gallery owner

Larry Gagosian. “He wasn’t locked in his studio,

having dinners with German curators and going to

bed at 9.30pm.” Serious collectors were confused

by his late nights spent at Studio 54, photographed

alongside his celebrity friends like Minnelli and

Bianca Jagger. And the 40-by-40 celebrity and

society portraits weren’t considered. Start-

ing around 1970, they were invented by Bruno

Bischo«erger, Warhol’s Zurich-based dealer, and

Thomas Ammann, his then assistant. “Later, we

called them ‘les Must de Warhol’ (les Must be-

ing a play on Cartier’s famous campaign),” says

Bischofberger. Robert Hughes, Time magazine’s

revered art critic, dismissed them as “fatuous”.

Still, regarding the body of work that included

Gianni Agnelli, Brigitte Bardot, Willy Brandt,

Aretha Franklin, Mick Jagger, Yves Saint Laurent,

C

AKG-IMAGES / PICTURE ALLIANCE / KPA STUDIO 54  ; © THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR THE VISUAL ARTS, INC./ DACS/ ARTIMAGE 2019 HARRY; JONES; HARING; MINNELLI   ; ARTWORK © 2019 THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR THE VISUAL ARTS, INC. / LICENSED BY DACS, LONDON. PHOTO © CHRISTIE’S IMAGES LIMITED 2019 ONO; HALSTON  ; ARTWORK © 2019 THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR THE VISUAL ARTS, INC. / LICENSED BY DACS, LONDON. PHOTO © COLLECTION OF JIM HEDGES, COURTESY HEDGES PROJECTS JAGGER; VON FURSTENBERG   

Debbie Harry

1980

Bianca Jagger

1981

Grace Jones

1984

Yoko Ono

1971

Keith Haring

1986

Liza Minnelli

1978

Halston

1974

Diane von

Furstenberg 1984

POP A BOTTLE

Above, from left to right: Bianca Jagger, Andy Warhol,

Jerry Hall and Lorna Luft at New York’s Studio 54 in 1977.

Left: rarely seen without his trusted camera, Warhol would

often use blown-up Polaroid photographs as a starting

point for his painted portraits

NOVEMBER 2019 VANITY FAIR ON ART 53

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