Orange Prince

Orange Prince is a painting by American artist Andy Warhol of Prince, the American singer, songwriter, record producer, multi-instrumentalist, actor, and director. The painting is one of twelve silkscreen portraits on canvas of Prince created by Warhol in 1984, based on an original photograph provided to Warhol by Vanity Fair. The photograph was taken by Lynn Goldsmith. These paintings and four additional works on paper are collectively known as the Prince Series. Each painting is unique and can be distinguished by color.

Orange Prince is considered an important late work referencing Warhol's portraits from the early 1960s, of movie stars and celebrity icons, such as Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Jacqueline Kennedy. Art historian and Warhol expert Thomas E. Crow believes that Warhol's portrait of Prince shows much greater freedom of expression, as in the early portraits. This is especially evident when compared to Warhol's more 'factory-line' style of portraits from the 1970s onwards, which were mainly commissions.

The Warhol portraits were not commissioned by Prince, but rather were made by Warhol for his private collection. Crow believes Warhol was fascinated by Prince, a young star not in Warhol's direct circle. He says that Warhol was drawn to Prince's edgy image, which acted as inspiration for the art work:

"(Warhol's) evident fascination with Prince, known for sexual frankness in his music and an androgynous style in his clothes, make-up, and hairstyle, echoed similar traits among those he famously gathered around himself in the Factory entourage of the 1960s."

Orange Prince takes inspiration from a black and white photograph by Lynn Goldsmith as its source image, depicting Prince in a full length pose during the burgeoning stages of his career in 1981. The magazine Vanity Fair, a Condé Nast publication, originally licensed the photograph from Goldsmith's agency, agreeing that the photograph would be used as an "artistic reference". Vanity Fair then commissioned Warhol, who created a cropped, highly colorized painting using just Prince's head from the photograph. Warhol's painting was then used for an article in the November 1984 issue of Vanity Fair, entitled "Purple Fame". Goldsmith received a co-credit for the illustration in the magazine. Warhol then created 15 other variants of the Prince portrait for his private collection, which became collectively known as the Prince Series; these variants were neither commissioned by Goldsmith, Vanity Fair, Condé Nast, nor Prince himself.

The composition of Orange Prince makes direct reference to the portraits Warhol produced in the 1960s, as Crow points out in his 2018 analysis of the painting. Crow likens the composition to Warhol's Marilyn Series where the subject's head 'floats' in day-glo color. According to Crow, the composition is distinct from other late portraits, the majority of which were commissions and followed a commercial formula, such as Warhol's portrait of Michael Jackson which was commissioned and created a few months before Orange Prince. As Crow says:

"Warhol's 1984 portraits (of Prince) ... harked back to the independently conceived celebrity likenesses of his earlier career (from the 1960s). As Prince had not commissioned any of the paintings, Warhol could experiment with far more variations in background patterns and colors."

The face of the subject is depicted in a neon orange color, the same as the background. The facial outline, features and hair are in black. Highlights of green and blue are woven onto the screen amongst the black line around the subject's facial features, hair and ears. The overall effect is to make the subject luminesce, with a trade-mark Warhol flatness to the image, due partly to the very little graduation of shading.