Joan Collins, 1985

This silkscreen print was made at a time when English actor Dame Joan Collins (b. 1933) was at the height of fame in the role of Alexis Carrington Colby in the American television series Dynasty. Made from a Polaroid photograph taken by Pop Artist Andy Warhol (1928–1987), the camera flash combines with the heightened colours to simplify Collins’ features to the bare essentials.

Warhol had a radical vision for art in the 1960s and would mass-produce his paintings of advertising images and consumer goods at his studio, known as the Factory. By using silkscreen printing onto canvas, the process removed any evidence of the artist’s hand in favour of an ‘assembly-line effect’, as he described it in his 1980 memoir POPism. The boldness and flatness of Warhol’s portrait reveals and revels in the superficial glamour of the age.

National Portrait Gallery, London. Purchased, 1994
© The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by DACS, London and Copyright Agency, Australia 2022