GERALD LAING

Selected Citations and Comments

This portrait was commissioned by the [Andy] Warhol Foundation. Although it is a posthumous work, I was familiar with the appearance of the subject since I first met Andy in 1963 and knew him reasonably well, especially during the remainder of the 1960s when I was living and working in New York.
The brief required a substantial Neoclassical treatment of the subject and in order to stress this effect four high quality plaster casts of the sculpture were ordered and installed in the Foundation’s offices, rather than the more usual bronze. The repetitive nature of the casts obviously referred to the stylistic habits of the subject in his own work.
I treated the very obvious wigs which he affected in his later years in a strictly formal manner in order to point up the difference between them and his real wispy hair which is just visible protruding near his ear in the photograph.

Gerald Laing, 'Portrait of Andy Warhol', unpublished manuscript, 2002