Liz

As perhaps the greatest cinematic icon of the silver screen in the latter half of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Taylor was clearly a fitting subject for Warhol’s celebrity-oriented art. From boyhood, Warhol had been fascinated by the glittering allure and glamour of Hollywood, particularly with its young female stars, from Shirley Temple to Natalie Wood. In retrospect, it seems inevitable that a figure as iconic as Liz Taylor would enter the Warholian canon. Indeed, of all the many famous stars that Andy Warhol knew and painted, he seems to have held Elizabeth Taylor in especially high regard, seeing her throughout his life as the absolute epitome of glamour. When asked once in 1964 if he would like to meet her, he immediately became coy and bashful, cooing ecstatically in response, “Ohhhh, Elizabeth Taylor, Ohhhhh. She’s so glamorous” (A. Warhol quoted in K. Goldsmith, I’ll be your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, New York, 2004, p. 26). When the two eventually met later in life, even becoming friends in the late 1970s,Warhol’s fascination with Taylor endured. He was famously heard to quip how as a choice of afterlife, he would like to be reincarnated as a “big ring” on Taylor’s finger.