The charismatic Dolly Parton, who died yesterday aged 80, was not just a country music legend, rhinestone queen and philanthropic trailblazer—she was also a muse for artists. “Parton was a mainstay in American popular culture for six decades,” the Smithsonian Institution, based in Washington, DC, said in a post on LinkedIn.
The post highlighted photographs of the music star in the institute’s collection, including an image of her taken in 1972 by Henry Horenstein. Parton was the subject of Horenstein's first published photograph, which appeared in the now-defunct entertainment newspaper Boston After Dark. Parton told the young photographer: “People don’t come out to see me looking like everybody else.”
One of the most famous depictions of Dolly is, of course, by Andy Warhol; his 1980s silkscreen, which has seeped into the public consciousness, shows her golden curls and transfixing mouth. In her 2023 memoir, Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones, she described bonding with Warhol at the Studio 54 nightclub in Manhattan in the 1970s. “Andy and I would mostly just sit on the couch and watch all these crazy people out there doing their thing,” Parton wrote. "We really got to know each other, just sitting on that couch."
In 2022, the Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts outlined in a Facebook post how the artist’s Dolly image was born: “On August 15, 1985, Warhol flew to Los Angeles for the wedding of Sean Penn and Madonna and, over the weekend, met Parton at Sandy Gallin’s [Parton’s agent’s] house for the sitting. With Keith Haring in tow, who flew with Warhol to attend the celebrity wedding, he took roughly 60 Polaroids of Parton. For a star known for her larger-than-life costumes, wigs and persona, the sitting was rather subdued, with Parton modifying her look once with an earring swap.”
One of the Dolly silkscreens fetched $626,500 (with fees) at Christie’s New York in 2012. The auction house noted in the catalogue that “Warhol was prolific with his portraiture and his portrait of Dolly stands out as uniquely successful; perhaps the best contemporary comparable to the success of Warhol's Dolly would be Jeff Koon's sculpture of Michael Jackson and Bubbles.” Warhol’s Polaroid shot of Parton is housed at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas while another version of the silkscreen is in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Other artists meanwhile have immortalised the "Jolene" songwriter. The high-profile photographer Annie Leibovitz photographed Parton a number of times—in 1991 for Vanity Fair and also in 2002 to mark the 62nd Grammy Awards. Meanwhile the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney says on social media that “one of the brightest stars in [Indigenous] artist Kaylene Whiskey's creative universe, Parton inspired [the] joyful artwork Dolly Visits Indulkana, [which was] a finalist in the 2020 Archibald Prize and [is] now in the gallery collection.”
In addition to appearing in many museum collections, Parton had been planning an institution of her own in Nashville for several years. According to her representatives, the Dolly’s Life Of Many Colors Museum is on schedule to open on 29 September.
Tributes have continued to pour in from across the cultural sector. Mary Anne Carter, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, said in a heartfelt statement on Wednesday (25 August): “I have always believed that the arts have the power to do something extraordinary: they can bring people together, tell our stories, preserve our culture, remind us of what we share and even heal us. As a fellow Tennessean and someone who has had the privilege of working in the arts, I believe few people have embodied that power more completely than Dolly Parton.”
Carter added later in the statement: “As an arts leader, I especially admire the way Dolly understood that creativity is not simply about entertainment. It is about opportunity. It is about giving people—especially young people—the chance to discover their own voices and imagine possibilities beyond what they may see around them.” Parton’s Imagination Library, a programme that gifts books to children in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and Republic of Ireland, is “a beautiful example of that belief,” she continued.
RIPower Dolly.