Andy Warhol’s Florence Barron #1–3 (1965) belong to a group of six canvases discovered in the artist’s studio after his death, closely related to the six-part portrait commissioned that year by the Detroit collector Florence Barron. One of Warhol’s early commissions, the Florence Barron paintings prefigure the increasingly prominent role that portraiture would come to play in the artist’s later practice.

Here, Barron likely posed in a photobooth, a photographic format that Warhol used repeatedly during this period and which was instrumental to some of his most significant portrait works, including his early self-portraits. The photobooth offered a ready-made sequence of closely related images, lending itself naturally to Warhol’s interest in seriality and the translation of photographic likeness into silkscreen. For Barron’s portrait, however, Warhol selected a single profile and repeated it across individual 20-by-16-inch canvases.

Subtle variations in printing give each image a distinct character. The canvases were prepared with slightly different values of Mars black, while the number and registration of the silkscreen impressions varied from work to work. An unusually low-contrast halftone allowed the image to build in density as impressions were superimposed, causing Barron’s features to shift between clarity and near-opacity.

Although Barron is shown in contemporary dress, her sharply defined profile recalls the traditional silhouette or cameo. Warhol melds these references to historical portraiture with the mechanical language of photographic reproduction, transforming an individual likeness through repetition, variation and the material contingencies of the silkscreen process.