Against a warm peach coloured background, Joan Robbin’s mesmerising gaze gently meets the viewer’s forming a uniquely arresting example of Andy Warhol’s Society Portraits. In this quintessentially Warholian portrait, the sitter’s image is defined primarily by her golden halo of perfectly quaffed hair, vivid red lipstick and striking blue eyes. The elegant curve of her neck adds a regal quality to the portrait, befitting of one of Warhol’s subjects. The Society Portraits, each of which was commissioned by the sitter, stand at the crossroads of key themes in Warhol’s practice: the interplay of commerce and fine art, the cult of celebrity and the seriality of image production.

By 1984, Warhol was no stranger to commissioned work. Decades earlier, in the late 1940s, Warhol had been commissioned by Tina Federicks, the then art editor of Glamour magazine, to complete a series of illustrations that became his idiosyncratic and infamous shoe illustrations. The society portraits, however, began in earnest in 1963 with Warhol’s first commissioned portrait of Ethel Scull, collector and wife of New York taxi mogul Robert Scull, a version of which now sits in the permanent collection of the Whitney. From his beginnings as a commercial illustrator, Warhol never shied from introducing commerce to the realm of fine art, both in financial structures surrounding his work and in subject matter, as in his radical silkscreened dollar bills of the early 1960s, and bold, brazen dollar signs of the 1980s.

The society portraits formed an eloquent extension of Warhol’s 1960s portraits and near obsessive fascination with celebrity. In the present work, Warhol depicts Joan Robbins with the same flat forms and vivid block colours he had employed in his portraits of Liz Taylor and Marilyn Monroe, epitomising curator Henry Geldzahler’s sentiment that “everyone was a star, not only for fifteen minutes, but, in this incarnation caught permanently on canvas, ‘forever’” (Henry Geldzahler, 'Andy Warhol: Virginal Voyeur', in: Exh Cat., Sydney, Museum of Contemporary Art, Andy Warhol: Portraits, 1993, p. 26). From Liza Minelli, to Truman Capote and Debbie Harry, each of Warhol’s portraits took a standardised format of 40 by 40 inches, the idea being that when presented side by side the images would form a portrait of society itself. When, thirty years after their making, Warhol’s portraits were exhibited collectively at the Grand Palais in Paris, author Jackie Wullschlager wrote “Warhol, New York soup can prince of conceptualism, becomes in Paris an opulent society portraitist in the tradition of John Singer Sargent or Kees van Dongen: master of colour, texture, clarity, precision, ravishing yet chilly, flattering even as he anatomises triviality and brittleness” (Jackie Wullschlager, ‘Andy Warhol’s paintings at Grand Palais’, in: Financial Times, April 2009, online).

To create his portraits, Warhol employed a semi-mechanised silk-screening process that allowed him to mass-produce his images. Beginning with a camera, Warhol would take rolls upon rolls of pictures of his subjects using a Polaroid camera. Often referring to his camera as his ‘pencil and paper’, Warhol used it as a filter with which to mediate his interaction with the world. Warhol was keenly aware of the potential of photography to shape meaning and to both reflect and reaffirm the wider cultural obsessions of the American public. Warhol’s captivation with the ephemerality of popular culture, as well as his concern with appearances and representation, make the Polaroid a fitting medium for his portraits. This Polaroid would then be blown up and converted into a negative which Warhol used to trace the sitter’s features onto the canvas from which he would create a silkscreen.

This process results in an idealised interpretation of his subject composed of simplified, colourful shapes. Joan Robbins provides the perfect example: with her striking blue eyes and cherry red lips, the sitter is reduced to her most basic elements while still maintaining her likeness. Warhol was recorded as saying: "I'll paint anybody. Anybody that asks me. I just try to make people look good" (Andy Warhol cited in: Jonathan Jones, ‘The Polaroid Production Line’, The Guardian, October 2008, online). Warhol understood the superficial nature of celebrity in American society; the mask created by marketing companies to commodify public figures that reveal little to nothing about the actual person behind it. Through Warhol’s mechanised and minimalizing silkscreen process, “everyone was a star, not only for fifteen minutes, but, in this incarnation caught permanently on canvas, ‘forever’” (Henry Geldzahler, 'Andy Warhol: Virginal Voyeur', in: Exh Cat., Sydney, Museum of Contemporary Art, Andy Warhol: Portraits, 1993, p. 26).

Modestly referring to himself as ‘just a travelling society painter’, Warhol’s innovative reinterpretation of portraiture is now hailed as having revived a dead art form. In this way, Joan Robbins locates itself at the intersection of tradition and popular culture, thereby representing not only a critical moment in Pop Art but in art history at large.