Early Celebrity Portraits

As a starstruck child, Warhol was already assembling scrapbooks filled with movie-star portraits. As a young man, he continued to collect celebrity portrait photographs, with special attention to images of Marilyn Monroe, Greta Garbo, and Elizabeth Taylor. These often anonymous and undistinguished publicity photos provided the starting point for many of his early Pop silkscreen paintings. A commercial technique that involves printing an image through a fine screen onto paper or canvas, the silkscreen process allowed Warhol to duplicate his source photographs quickly, cheaply and precisely, in varied sizes and patterns, and overlaid with vivid colors. From the early 1960s to the early 1980s, Warhol almost completely abandoned the brush and pen in favor of the silkscreen technique.

Starting in 1963, Warhol also used photobooth portrait strips as source images for his silkscreen paintings. He hit upon the idea when Harper's Bazaar assigned him to devise illustrations for a story on new faces in the arts. Warhol sent the subjects, who included artist Larry Poons and curator Henry Geldzahler of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to a photobooth to make portraits of themselves, which he used in the resulting magazine layout. Subsequently, Time magazine commissioned a cover illustration for a story on "today's teenagers," and Warhol utilized similar photobooth images of the sons and daughters of the magazine's editors.