Mick Jagger Portfolio

The portfolio expands upon earlier themes in Warhol’s oeuvre including depictions of fame, celebrity, high society, and an interest in mass-produced imagery. Warhol is known for plundering instantly recognisable glamorous images from the pantheon of modern celebrity. Works such as Marilyn and Liz sought to challenge traditional notions of originality and mastery in art. However, the Mick Jagger portfolio deviates from his initial foray into portraiture during the 1960s because Warhol found it was no longer necessary to appropriate images of his subjects from magazines and newspapers. Since Warhol’s own stardom had ascended to a level of fame on par with the celebrities he had once idolised from afar, he was able to work directly with them, taking photographs of sitters in his own studio.

As the basis for many of his silkscreen portraits from this period, Warhol would capture his subjects with Polaroid shots, which he would then enlarge and transfer through his silkscreen printing process.  Warhol became obsessed with the pervasiveness of photography and the ubiquitous images of celebrities.  For Warhol, photography was mechanical, easily reproducible, and closely tied to mass culture and industry. Because of this, it helped him challenge the ideas of authenticity and originality perpetuated by movements such as Abstract Expressionism. This simplistic process emulates machine-made effects, and its repetition reduces Jagger to a purely marketable brand. As an artist whose roots lay in illustration and advertising, Warhol was extremely aware of the power of images to influence culture.

In 1975, Warhol developed a new technique: he incorporated isolated fields of colour and torn graphic art paper into his maquettes for screenprints. This created collage-like effects in the final works, visible throughout the portfolio. The blocks of colour add an abstract element to the composition. This was a nod to Warhol’s nascent interest in more non-representational art, which would rise in prominence with the Shadows (1978–1979), Rorschach (1984), and Camouflage (1986–1987) artworks in the years to come.

Warhol was not the only artist to work with images of Mick Jagger. Richard Hamilton made a series of works titled ‘Swingeing London’, which is based on a newspaper photograph of Mick Jagger and the art dealer, Robert Fraser, handcuffed together in the back of a police van. In 1967, Cecil Beaton photographed Jagger and went on to create some of the decade’s most famous and memorable images of the rock star. Hamilton, Beaton and Warhol’s images portray Jagger’s hedonistic, decadent lifestyle. All three images comment on the press's ability to turn Mick Jagger’s image into a brand. Although these two photographs preceded Warhol’s screenprints of Jagger, Warhol’s work goes a step further by using his iconic concept of seriality to make a starker comment on the mass production of Jagger’s image.

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