“If I’d gone ahead and died ten years ago, I’d probably be a cult figure today.”
Executed in 1986 as one of the final self-portraits that Andy Warhol would create before his untimely death the following year, Self-Portrait endures as his last grand artistic gesture and embodies the artist’s ultimate meditation on mortality, identity, and image: Warhol, who dedicated his career to exploring the construction of identity and the power of media, now turns to face his own mortality. Pulsating with the intensity of its confrontational gaze, Warhol’s unmistakable portrait emerges from inky black aura; he is obscured by a veil of camouflage, the silkscreen overlay of which graphically renders the dichotomy of inner and public self that pervaded Warhol’s enigmatic persona, while his patriotic palette of red, white and blue nod to the American identity and broader cultural milieu in which the artist operated. The present work’s monumental 80-inch format—exceeded only in scale by seven known 108-inch examples—endows it with a unique status as both an engulfing cenotaph and a highly personal encounter. Attesting to the undeniable and universally acknowledged significance of these works, other Fright Wig self portraits of the same 80-inch format grace international museum collections including the Tate Gallery, London; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; the Baltimore Museum of Art; and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. The present work is further distinguished for its inclusion in Warhol’s seminal 1986 exhibition at Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, from which Emily Fisher Landau acquired it the following year. Piercing and all-consuming, Self-Portrait presents a resounding memorial of both Warhol the man and Warhol the artistic phenomenon.
Warhol’s initial foray into self-portraiture began as a student in Pittsburgh in 1948, with an irreverent painting that he submitted to the city’s annual artists' exhibition entitled The Broad Gave Me My Face, But I Can Pick My Own Nose. Whilst lacking the affected cool of his later output, this stridently humorous and attention-seeking performance anticipates the awareness of audience that would characterize the artist’s subsequent self-reflections. Warhol would return to self-portraiture in the 1960s—first in 1963-64, then in 1966-67. In contrast to the long-idealized view of a self-portrait stemming from an artist’s introspective volition, from its genesis Warhol’s self-portraiture was a means of performing for a public other. Maintained through his aloof conduct in interviews, wild social calendar and the styling of his physical appearance, his fastidiously constructed and highly affected public image was almost as famous as his artistic production. And, from Marilyn Monroe to Liz Taylor and Elvis Presley, Warhol assembled his legion of visual icons who, rendered in his unique Technicolor vision, came to define an entirely new aesthetic movement and celebrity culture of America beginning in the 1960s. Yet despite being the most famous American artist of his time, Warhol remained a private individual, shielded by the characters he played and the masks he wore, to which he alludes in Self-Portrait.
Large-Scale Fright Wig Self-Portraits in Important Museum Collections
Designed originally for purposes of concealment and disguise, the camouflage pattern in Self-Portrait becomes a nuanced paradoxical motif when applied to the figure of Warhol himself: rather than blending into the background, Warhol is distinguished, even further amplified by his famous fright wig. Camouflage, in this way, embodies Warhol’s critical commentary on the artifice inherent in fame in his mature career, symbolizing the fraught tensions between visibility and invisibility that he experienced as both artist and persona, while his red, white and blue chromatic coating alludes to the American culture that his legacy forever changed. Indeed, for Warhol, the son of Slovakian immigrants in working class Pittsburg, fame in America was not merely the province of actors, musicians, or politicians; as he realized, fame could be harnessed by artists themselves, even manufactured.
In Self-Portrait, each individual printed raster is discretely discernable and brought into the sharpest of focus, chiming in sonorous contrast as Warhol’s starkly illuminated countenance emerges in spectacular chromatic patterning from an abstract darkness. The perfected clarity of the transferred image in Self-Portrait reveals the artist at the apotheosis of his iconic silkscreen method: starkly anchored by Warhol’s disembodied visage – his iconic fright wig, pallid countenance, and intense gaze unmistakable, all cast in the electric and instantaneous glow of a camera flash—the composition offers a sense of unmediated access and scrutiny to his portrait never before afforded to his public. Amidst this act of radical revelation, Warhol employs his recurring motif of camouflage to deconstruct the underlying portrait, putting forth his genius for contradiction in full display and drama: he appears to hide in plain sight. “That could be a really American invention,” Warhol has once stated. “The best American invention—to be able to disappear” (the artist quoted in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and back again, Orlando, 1975, p. 113). Nevertheless evoking the primacy of raw unedited film or the printed newspaper, the slick and glistening graphic rendering recalls the stars of the silver screen whom Warhol had venerated in his early career, and indeed whose fame he had now come to surpass.
With the preceding Death and Disaster series and the Electric Chairs series that were so seminal to his career, Warhol had always exhibited a preoccupation with sudden death, even before Valerie Solanas entered the Factory and nearly killed him in 1968. In the present work, the mysterious image of the artist's features indeed seems to convey an intuitive awareness of his own impending death: from his sunken cheeks and parted lips to his incredibly penetrating stare, Warhol’s likeness becomes distinctly skull-like. He used as his source for these paintings a Polaroid photograph—the instantaneous image-capturing method which had guided his portrait practice of the previous decade. Warhol wore a black turtle-neck sweater for his portrait, which, when filtered through the stark contrast of the monochrome silk-screen, allows the neck to disappear completely. The result is an eerie illusion of a disembodied head floating in a black void. The macabre existentialism locked in this image was not lost on contemporary critics, as John Caldwell notes, "The new painting…has by contrast with them a strange sense of absoluteness. Perhaps this comes in part from the fact that the artist's neck is invisible, or it may derive from the oddly lit nimbus of hair that seems posed forever over his head. Certainly the portrait derives part of its power from the sense that we are being given a rare chance to witness the aging of an icon." (John Caldwell, "A New Andy Warhol at the Carnegie", Carnegie Magazine, January – February 1987, p. 9)
"The new painting, coming as it does twenty years after the last great self-portraits in the sixties, has by contrast with them a strange sense of absoluteness. Perhaps this comes in part from the fact that the artist's neck is invisible, or it may derive from the oddly lit nimbus of hair that seems posed forever over his head. Certainly, the portrait derives part of its power from the sense that we are being given a rare chance to witness the aging of an icon."
Moving away from the vibrant monochrome colors used for his silver-screen stars, in the present camouflaged silkscreen, we find the most melancholic manifestation of Warhol’s prophetic epiphany: a true legend is a posthumous legend. As the twentieth century’s paragon of Pop Art and maven of American mass culture, Warhol faces his own mortality in Self-Portrait from 1986, revealing the most iconic vision of an artist so famously obsessed with the transience of life and the enduring power of image. Emerging from slick, black lamina and shaded with graphic contours of red, white and blue camouflage, the most recognizable American artist of all time simultaneously appears and disappears in front of our eyes. “If you want to know about Andy Warhol, then just look at the surface of my pictures, my movies and me, and there I am,” the artist once professed. “There’s nothing behind it” (the artist quoted in: Hal Foster, “Death in America,” in Annette Michelson & Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Eds. Andy Warhol, Cambridge, 2001, p. 71). Paradoxically knowable and unknowable, concealed and emergent, vulnerable and guarded, the present portrait of duality captures the quintessence of Andy Warhol during the final years of his life and inducts the artist into the limited cadre of great self-portraitists who have masterfully defined the genre’s captivating history.
