At twenty-nine, Wyeth already had a reputation as a superb portraitist—among others, he had painted Kirstein and the late John F. Kennedy.

When Warhol invited Wyeth to join him at the Factory, he might have imagined how an association with a famous Wyeth could further serve his own celebrity. He was also keenly interested in American portraiture from John Singleton Copley to Andrew Wyeth and must have seen his own portrait practice as part of that historical lineage. Wyeth enthusiastically accepted Warhol’s invitation. The pair might have seemed polar opposites in their art and their personas, but they shared something fundamental: a complete disregard for the established art world hierarchies that pitted the “new” against the “traditional.”

Early in 1976, Wyeth set up in a screened-off studio space on the third floor of the Factory. Warhol posed for Wyeth, and Wyeth became a voyeur, watching his inscrutable subject move among assistants, movie stars, and hangers-on. Warhol was similarly engrossed in Wyeth: when he posed, Warhol taped their discussions—about the oil painter’s craft, about deep and dark musings—and he made Polaroids of Wyeth, too, all the while he painted. [1]

…

Wyeth had a clear idea, he said, of what he wanted to do at the Factory. He was inspired by Warhol’s compulsions to record everyone around him and to make a stream-of-consciousness audio diary. “His whole thing of . . . turning himself into a sort of tape recorder—that appealed to me,” Wyeth has said. “I selfishly wanted to record him and paint every pimple that he had on his face. And he let me.” [2]

It was not long before an idea for reciprocal portraits took hold: it came rather naturally as the artists talked, and Wyeth’s dealer, Warren Adelson, raised the possibility of a grand unveiling of what could be their paired productions. [3]

The exhibition, Andy Warhol and Jamie Wyeth: Portraits of Each Other, opened at Coe Kerr’s East 82nd Street gallery in June 1976 featuring Wyeth’s oil of Andy and Warhol’s six-panel Polaroid-derived acrylic silkscreened portrait of Jamie. Warhol had created his kind of fan-magazine movie star shot of the young, handsome Wyeth. Wyeth had made a warts-and-all head of Warhol that shocked as Wyeth-brand realism always could. Painted as though under the glare of a hot yellow strobe, Warhol, without make-up, all blotchy red skin, was exposed as never before. [4]

…

The two-dozen Wyeth drawings that were also on exhibition were generally overlooked or were dismissed as preliminary work. Yet the various portraits of Warhol in black and white are hardly mere outtakes from an effort to discern one true Andy for posterity in oil. They are the record of the many Andys that Wyeth saw.

There is the Andy of posing and posturing. The standing figure from behind, Back to Cranky, for example, strikes a defiant stance yet exposes what Warhol hides: his dark hair and balding head barely covered by the awkward white wig he used to morph from man to boy; and the knotted hands and fingers that suggest a man in anguish. Self-conscious Andy, “a.w. Ill at ease,” is a sympathetic image that runs counter to the ruthlessness of the oil portrait. Self-absorbed Warhol, as shown in “a.w. Boxed,” is distant, drawn small on a large board.

Warhol and Wyeth both appreciated the power of the ennobling classical profile pose. The iconic classicizing portraits of America’s Founding Fathers were suddenly everywhere in 1976. And Warhol was already keen on collecting such portrait busts along with American Federal-era furniture decorated with cameo heads and classical motifs; he even owned a cast-iron George Washington as Roman senator [5]. Wyeth was working on a series of profile portraits of Thomas Jefferson in these months, just ahead of America’s Bicentennial summer—one would appear on the cover of a special Bicentennial issue of Time magazine [6]. Wyeth made life-size profile heads of Andy facing left and right, as seen in “a.w.: life size right portrait” and “a.w.: life size left profile, seersucker,” that mimic the powdered and periwigged Revolution-era types drawn with a physiognotrace. Warhol, more icon than man, could be accommodated into the vast artistic vocabulary that Wyeth possesses.

The sparsely filled sheets of delicate drawing, all nervous ink and pencil line and brushed gouache, are not just Warhol in brief, but in essence. Viewing the drawings of Warhol on exhibition, one reporter said, was like “a visit with a ghost.” [7] The overwhelming color of Warhol being matte white, the drawings are consistently on tan paper or toned paperboard that provides the underlying flesh tone. The slight man’s craggy face, his long bony hands and fingers, and his uniform, a casually hanging shirt, jacket, and tie, are typically drawn with brevity, in pencil, charcoal, and wash. These make up the armature that carries the defining touch, the passages of opaque white that transform undeveloped line and shade into “Warhol.” White also operates metaphorically, without form, as pure emotional brushwork, the artist permeating the page with the very idea of Andy Warhol. In one sketch, “FOR P.W. — WHO GETS WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT MORE THAN ANYONE,” Warhol is a haunting disembodied hand and face, the real life face of Andy emerging from a dense cloud of white gouache. In another, “a.w. draws/signs autographs," he draws or signs autographs, so Wyeth’s inscription tells us, with his skeletal white hands, and the surrounding space filled with white, the palpable presence of the ineffable spirit of Andy Warhol.

“It’s so good to take my Andy suit off,” Warhol confided to his diary. [8] Wyeth was present for moments when Warhol might let his performance lapse. On one occasion, “a.w. liked this but this week didn’t. I stopped,” he revealed his ravaged torso bearing the marks of a legendary act of violence—a Factory film actress, Valerie Solanas, had shot Warhol in a murder attempt in 1968. It was an equally potent emblem of survival, this record of the extensive surgeries required to bring Warhol back from the dead. Wyeth noted on this sheet that Andy “liked this” sketch until he didn’t, and so, he wrote, “I stopped.” In it we glimpse a bit of the tortured life concealed beneath the Andy suit and hidden behind the Warhol mask.

—Patricia Junker, excerpt from Jamie Wyeth, Andy Warhol, Rudolf Nureyev: Masquerade, Schoelkopf Gallery, 2024

[1] A full account of this episode is given by Joyce Hill Stoner in “Andy Warhol and Jamie Wyeth: Interactions,” American Art 13, no. 3 (Fall 1999), pp. 59-82; and in her catalogue essay, “The Patriarch of Pop and the Prince of Realism: Andy Warhol and Jamie Wyeth in the 1970s,” in Factory Work: Warhol, Wyeth, Basquiat (Rockland, Maine: Farnsworth Art Museum and Wyeth Center, 2006), pp. 28-65.

[2] Wyeth quoted in Stoner, “the Patriarch of Pop,” p. 40.

[3] Warren Adelson, “My Work with Jamie Wyeth and Andy Warhol in the 1970s,” in unpublished memoir, “Chasing Sargent,” 2025.

[4] Wyeth explained to a reporter that he had forced Warhol to sit “with a strobe light in his face, which not only is rather warm after a while but also shows up every little detail.” See Martha E. Espedahl, “Jamie Paints Warhol, and Vice Versa,” Morning News (Wilmington, Delaware), Sunday, April 25, 1976, Home section, p. 17. Espedahl’s article is based on her visit to the Factory.

[5] I am grateful to Barbara Floyd for sharing with me this close visual connection with the standard Jefferson portraits. For Warhol’s Federal furniture and objects, see John W. Smith, ed., Possession Obsession: Andy Warhol and Collecting (Pittsburgh: The Andy Warhol Museum, 2002).

[6] Time 105, no. 20 (July 4, 1976).

[7] Claire Hieronymus, “Warhol-Wyeth Show: Gimmicky ‘Big Event,’” Tennessean, January 23, 1977, p. 64.

[8] Warhol, as recorded in the documentary series, Andy Warhol Diaries, episode 3, “A Double Life: Andy and John,” written and directed by Andrew Rossi, executive producer Ryan Murphy, based on the 1989 book edited by Pat Hackett, debuted March 9, 2020, on Netflix: https:/www.netflix.com:TheAndyWarholDiaries.