Holly Solomon, 1963–1964

... I asked Andy to do my portrait. We went to Broadway and 47th Street, where they had this photobooth. Andy met me there, and we had a bunch of quarters. He was very particular about which booth. We tried a whole bunch of them... We finally decided on a booth. Andy took a few pictures, he stood there with me for a little bit and then he left me on my own. So I did the pictures all by myself. It helped being private and he understood that, too... Actually, if you're in a photobooth for a long time it gets pretty boring... I got so bored that I started to really act in them. I was a student then of Lee Strasberg, so I started to do all these acting exercises... Fifty dollars is a lot in a photobooth!
– Holly Solomon, on the photobooth sitting that produced the present lot.

Holly Solomon (1934–2002) became involved in the contemporary art scene in the early 1960s. Her academic background was not primarily in the visual arts, but rather in theater, her first love. She studied acting at Vassar and Sarah Lawrence College and minored in art history. Discouraged by her attempts to become a professional actress, she turned her focus on supporting contemporary art. She would eventually, in 1975, found the famous Holly Solomon Gallery in New York, where she represented some of the most important artists of the 20th century including Joan Mitchell, Gordon Matta-Clark, Laurie Anderson, Nam June Paik and William Wegman, among others.

Relatively early on in her time as a prominent art collector with her husband Horace, Holly Solomon became set on commissioning a portrait of herself by Warhol. Warhol’s practice at the time was to begin work on one of his large-scale canvases with a photobooth session. And so, Solomon met Warhol at a Broadway photobooth, a session that produced the unique photographic work on offer here.

The subsequent portrait that Warhol painted shows a glamourous, smiling young woman with the iconic ‘flip’ hairdo of the 1960s. Solomon later commented that she considered herself quite different from the woman portrayed in the painted work. Perhaps the source photobooth images, including those in the present lot, provide a broader view of the young, bright and charismatic Solomon at this pivotal time of her life.