Andy Warhol’s career as an artist was defined by his portrayals of notorious individuals across various disciplines, as his sitters included musicians, movie stars, athletes and dancers. It is no surprise that he therefore decided to portray the internationally renowned and widely acclaimed dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, who widely contributed to the redefinition of dance technique in the 20th century. Graham was renowned for creating a language in movement based on the expressive capacity of the human body, a technique still practiced by professional dancers today. She has often been described as the ‘Picasso of Dance’, and Warhol’s portraits serve to enhance her prominent position in the history of the performing arts.

Warhol’s captivation of the ephemerality of popular culture, as well as his concern with appearances and representation, make the Polaroid a fitting medium for his portraits. Warhol’s portrait of the American dancer was realised using his innovative technique of silkscreen ink and acrylic on canvas, derived in turn from an initial Polaroid photograph. The artist would take multiple rolls of pictures of his subjects with his Polaroid, which he would use as a filter through which to mediate his interaction with the world. These pictures were blown-up into a negative and used to trace the subject’s features onto the canvas. The details were then painted directly onto the work using acrylic paint, before converting the negative into a silkscreen that was used to print the photographic image in ink over the painted canvas. Warhol was among the first artists to incorporate the diamond dust material into his silkscreens, with his first use being in the 1980 series Diamond Dust Shoes, and he continuously returned to it in the following years. He specifically chose this material to heighten the sense of glamour and myth within his paintings. In this case, the diamond dust is employed to render Graham’s simplified facial features.

In the present work, Martha Graham stares directly at the viewer. Her facial features shine through by means of the glimmering diamond dust. With her almost concealed nose and lack of tonal variation in her flesh, the American dancer is reduced to her most basic elements while still maintaining her likeness.

Warhol understood the superficial nature of celebrity in American culture; the mask created by marketing companies to commodify public figures that reveal little to nothing about the actual person behind it. Through his mechanised and minimising silkscreen process, “everyone was a start, 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).

Alongside this portrait and two others, in 1986 Warhol produced three screen prints of the American contemporary dancer to comprise his Martha Graham series: Letter to the World (The Kick) (Unique), Lamentation and Satyric Festival Song, all of which showcase the physical and emotional depth of Graham’s dance technique. These were executed on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the opening of the Martha Graham Dance Company in New York.

Ethereal and otherworldly, the present work encapsulates Warhol’s innovative reinterpretation of portraiture, which is now hailed as having revived a dead art form. In this way, it 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.