Celebrity Portraits

Long before his iconic portraits of the rich and famous cemented him as a household name, Andy Warhol spent his childhood collecting celebrity autographs and decorating his room with photos torn from tabloid magazines. His fixation on celebrities only continued when he moved to New York to become an illustrator for Glamour magazine and endured through his career as a Pop artist. Starlets, politicians, athletes—Warhol captured them all. “I’ll paint anybody. Anybody that asks me. I just try to make people look good,” he once said. To create his portraits, Warhol used a semi-mechanized silkscreen process that allowed him to mass-produce images of his subjects. Critics have long observed that his technique mirrors the nature of celebrity itself, where icons like Mick Jagger, Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, and Elvis Presley have become commodities to be bought and sold.