Portrait of Jack Tanzer

In late 1969 Warhol inaugurated Interview magazine as a hip forum for these newfound associates, and in the early seventies he began a highly lucrative series of portraits commissioned by his rich and famous clientele. Among the New York art establishment who sat for Warhol was a group of prominent art dealers and gallery owners that included Leo Castelli, Sidney Janis, and, as seen in the Chrysler portrait, Jack Tanzer. Tanzer was then president of Knoedler-Modarco art galleries, and during the 1970s he helped Walter Chrysler build his collection of European and American paintings. Tanzer would also become an important patron of the Chrysler Museum of Art, in 1976 donating a significant collection of Pre-Columbian works of art and in 1981 this portrait. The closely cropped, bust-length format-a dramatic, "close-up" presentation that, as former Factory assistant Fred Hughes noted, focuses attention on "the icon effect of the head and shoulders"-is typical of Warhol's seventies portraiture. So, too, was his mechanical, assembly-line production method. He began the portrait by taking a series of black-and-white Polaroid photographs of Tanzer. (Tanzer recalls that Warhol took hundreds of photos during the sitting.) Warhol then sent the best print to a laboratory, where the image was photo-mechanically enlarged in black and white and transferred to a silkscreen. His studio assistants then silkscreened the image onto canvas, which was mounted on a standard-sized, forty-inch-square stretcher. The portraits were generally produced as diptychs and sometimes in groups of four. The Chrysler's Jack Tanzer was originally one of four identical images created from the same Polaroid. Though Warhol made the initial Polaroids of his subjects and chose the best one for enlargement, his subsequent role in the creative process was characteristically limited to a few embellishments with the brush. Before the image was silkscreened, he typically applied areas of acrylic color to the canvas to locate general design elements such as hair and costume. After printing, he added his final color accents in broad swaths of paint. As seen in Jack Tanzer, this working method allowed Warhol to suppress detail and heighten tonal contrast and, in so doing, to present his sitters more as glamorous masks than as knowable entities.

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