and sultry blue background. There were numerous examples from the Flowers series, but only the enormous ones stopped me in my tracks, bewildering me with their monumental bluntness. In truth, I was not a terribly informed visitor. Warhol dovetailed with my budding romance with American pop culture (from the Silver Surfer to Frank Zappa), which miraculously co-existed with a love for the historicism of Oxford, from its old walls, thoroughfares and parks to its many relations with the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

The first time I hung Warhol’s art in an exhibition was in 1977. This occurred when I was enrolled in a doctoral program at Boston University. As part of an internship at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, I helped the director select works for an exhibition drawn fromsmall dab of paint as Sargent,” he wrote, and then added, “The painting puts the actual vases to shame.”

In October 1986 I conducted an interview with Warhol in the galleries of a John Singer Sargent retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. It was published by Arts Magazine the following February, with the title “Warhol meets Sargent at Whitney.” We met in the galleries when the museum was open to the public, and Andy turned up with the young man he called his “bodyguard” (Benjamin Liu, whose stage name was “Ming Vauze”). One part of my research on Sargent had addressed the eroticism of some of male figures, especially his studies of models. When I published an essay on this topic it was met with