Print Portfolio Performance 2000-2023

After graduating from Carnegie Tech, Andy Warhol’s dream was to find work in New York City—but he doubted his own talent. So he instead applied to teach art at a school in India. They returned his portfolio with a notice of rejection. Dejected, Andy decided to try New York anyway— despite his mother telling him that he would “end up dead in the gutter without a penny in his pocket.”

He took with him a paper bag that contained his one valuable asset: a portfolio filled with drawings of people and flowers. At an interview with Harper’s Bazaar, a cockroach crawled out of the bag when he opened it to exhibit his work. (Andy said the editor felt sorry for him, and he got the job.) His friends took to calling him “Raggedy Andy” or “Andy Paperbag.” Two decades later, Andy returned to that time, creating art that was a redemption of his impoverished beginning.

From the mid ‘60s through the early ‘70s, Warhol’s art underwent a period of transition. Having publicly given up painting, he began screenprinting images on paper that resembled his canvas masterpieces. The prints were usually iterations of his paintings, depicting their subject and capturing their essence while remaining distinct from them.

In 1967, five years after painting Marilyn Monroe, Warhol selected her image as the subject of his first portfolio of glamorous prints. After establishing a print-publishing business called Factory Additions, he used the same publicity still that he had used for dozens of paintings to create a set of ten different-colored screenprints.

The resulting prints could not have been more opposite of the young artist who arrived in New York. He had seemed to be all of one color: from that pale, wispy hair to the wan eyes to the worn chinos. With a single dark exception, these Marilyns were rich, with hot reds and pinks and yellows and other saturated hues transforming an icon’s face into an even deeper work of fiction.

And these prints, unlike the illustrated drawings with which he arrived, were masterpieces. Creating each image was more complex—and more mechanical—than painting, requiring five different silkscreens to achieve the finished effect. These were intended to be framed and placed in a museum, not a paper bag.

Portfolios became a way of establishing both himself and his subjects as grand, enduring icons—as he had always wanted it. In rapid succession, Warhol created print portfolios of Flash – November 22, 1963 (1968), Campbell’s Soup (1968-69), Flowers (1970), Electric Chairs (1971), and Sunset (1972). After painting Mao, his first painting of the decade, in 1972, Warhol’s manager and quasi-art director Fred Hughes decided that all new paintings would be accompanied by a full print portfolio.

Despite this, Warhol’s portfolio print-making ebbed through the late ‘70s. It returned in full force in the mid ‘80s, with about half of his portfolios being created in the six years before his death.

Warhol’s portfolios were intended to be displayed together as a single piece of art, demonstrating the power of repetition. By design, they have the quality of a film—with variables such as color, contrast, and image playing out against a constant background.

Two factors, however, generally kept portfolios from being displayed as a whole.

• Single prints are quite large by themselves. A print from the Myths or Endangered Species portfolios measures more than three feet per side, and a single print is capable of visually filling a wall on its own.
• Portfolios comprise between two and sixteen images. A portfolio of Reigning Queens with no space between them would fill 134 sq. ft. of wall space.

The scale and number of the individual prints made whole portfolios nearly impossible to display in their entirety in a typical residential room in the ‘60s and ‘70s—especially in New York City and other big cities in which Warhol’s collector base was concentrated.

As a result, most portfolios were slowly broken up and sold as individual prints. While no exact numbers exist, very few portfolios with matching edition numbers remain intact; the number decreases every year. Complete portfolios have now become so rare that some larger portfolios, such as Ads, do not come up for sale for years at a time.

As portfolios have become rarer, both living spaces and museums have grown larger, increasing demand for artwork that can fill those spaces. Additionally, more private owners, gallerists, and exhibitors can afford to purchase portfolios than could forty years ago.