Andy Warhol

In the 1980s, Warhol was admired by many of his younger contemporaries. He collaborated with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, and served as a mentor to numerous young artists who looked to him for advice and support. Among them was Robert Mapplethorpe, who had admired his elder colleague whilst still a student at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in the late 1960s. The singer Patti Smith notes that Mapplethorpe ‘loved Andy Warhol and considered him our most important living artist. It was as close to hero worship as he ever got. ’ This admiration, however, was tempered once the man who was to become one of the most renowned American photographers of his time realised that Warhol relied more on the help of others than he himself helped them. In 1983 and on three other occasions, the two artists photographed one another.

In this photographic portrait, Mapplethorpe captures the fragility of a Warhol who was already unwell and whose popularity was waning. The large empty space that the composition creates around him helps to suggest the artist’s loneliness. The fixed, sombre expression that characterises him and the way in which he nervously folds his hands reveal his unease just as much as they are consistent with the image created and cultivated by the Prince of Pop throughout his life.