It was impossible not to meet him. I was in New York once or twice a month for 21 years, all the time. I had an apartment there, I saw all the artists all the time, and you bumped into Andy Warhol, you know, before lunch and at teatime. And he liked it if you went and visited him in the factory. And I was always saying to him, ‘I want to do a big show of yours in London; would you like to do it?’ He said, ‘Yeah, great.’ ‘And what would you like to show, Andy?’ ‘Oh, that’s up to you. I’ll do whatever you want.’ ‘What do you mean, you’ll do whatever I want?’ ‘I do whatever you want.’ So I then… it took a long time to get it through to my thick skull that I really had to pick something, and it took me a long time to come up with this completely obvious idea of a self-portrait. It was years since he had done a great self-portrait. Believe it or not, at the end of his life, nobody had a good word to say for him, whether they were august museum directors or collectors, or the general public. He was considered a has-been. It was considered that he had done nothing good and important since Mao, which I think Mao was ‘72. So I felt that it was behoven on me to try to, if I was going to work with him, make a great proposal to him of a really important work. So to propose to him the self-portrait, and for that to be a colossal success – and, you know, they went all over the world to great collections and to museums, immediately. There’s one hanging in the Metropolitan; there’s one hanging in the Guggenheim. That was a great thing. And at the same time he was having this brilliant idea of stitching photographs. He had been doing photographs of that sort. You know, the whole time you were with him, he was… he had a camera, and he was taking photographs. It was a sort of way of covering his incredible shyness, which people sort of don’t realise how unbelievably shy he was the whole time. And then to stitch them together, so we have the multiple imagery which was the thing, if you like, that he invented, and photography as painting, was the most brilliant concept. And, if you look at the subject matter, you will see his preoccupation with death. After all, this was somebody who was shot at close quarters and died on the operating table and then was brought back again. He was working on a portrait of Samuel Beckett when he died. A very tragic thing, because that great eagle’s head that Samuel Beckett had would have looked pretty great – ‘In all sorts of pretty colours, Anthony,’ were his last words to me on the telephone three days before he died. He was flying to Paris to photograph Samuel Beckett. ‘I’ll paint him in all sorts of pretty colours for you.’
