Warhol’s lyrical drawing of Martha Graham — produced in the final year of his life — belongs to the broader project he undertook in the 1980s of making cultural monuments out of American performers and icons, a project that included his Athletes series, his Myths portfolio, and his images of Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe. Graham herself was eighty-nine when this drawing was made in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of her dance company. She had long since ceased performing, but she remained the presiding intelligence of American modern dance. Lamentation (1930) was among her most celebrated solos: performed in a tube of purple jersey that emphasized the geometry of the body in motion rather than its anatomy, it became a canonical statement of expressionist abstraction in movement. Warhol’s graphite rendering translates that sculptural quality back into line on paper — an act of homage from one protean New York artist to another.
