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Andy Warhol
Description
- Andy Warhol
- Self-Portrait
- signed and dated 1948; signed on the reverse
- watercolor and pencil on cardboard
- 16 by 8 5/8 in. 40.6 by 21.9 cm.
Provenance
Acquired by the present owner as a gift from the artist in 1948
Exhibited
New York, Grey Art Gallery & Study Center, New York University; Pittsburgh, Carnegie Museum of Art; Philadelphia, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, "Success is a Job in New York...": The Early Art and Business of Andy Warhol, March - November 1989, cat. no. 9, p. 26, illustrated
Literature
David Bourdon, Warhol, New York, 1989, fig. 8, p. 20, illustrated
Callie Angell, et al, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, 1994, p. 163, illustrated
Catalogue Note
There was no question about his very special talent... Andy was an original.
-- Leonard Kessler
Almost twenty years before producing his first Pop Art work, Andy Warhol was a shy and reticent student at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute. On the verge of failure at the end of his first year, Andy was asked by the faculty to spend the summer producing a portfolio in order to be allowed to continue into his sophomore year. Samuel Rosenberg offered the following parting advice to young Warhol: “You must quit drawing things that you think I want. You have got to do things the way you want them. And be damned with what anybody else around you thinks. Go do it the way you see it, to please yourself, or you’ll never amount to anything.” (Bennard B. Perlman, “The Education of Andy Warhol” in The Andy Warhol Museum, New York, 1994, p. 155)
With the support of the faculty and the encouragement of his friends, among them Len Kessler, Phillip Pearlstein and Art Elias, Warhol began to discover the tremendous talent and undeniable originality of which he was capable. Riding around Pittsburgh in his brother’s vegetable truck and enrolled in summer classes, young Warhol created an astounding collection of drawings, paintings and sketches of the surrounding cityscape: old Forbes Field, the U.S. Steel Mill and city museums among other sites. Upon the presentation of his summer’s work, the faculty quickly realized the burgeoning talent in Warhol and in a giant reversal of opinion, awarded the Martin B. Leisser Prize to Andy, above everyone else in his freshman class, followed in 1948 by the Mrs. John L. Porter Prize for Progress.
At the end of their junior year, Len Kessler and Warhol exchanged drawings. This magnificent self-portrait was one of the works traded in kind. In a letter dated July 25, 2006, Mr. Kessler writes that “The self portrait that Andy made in his junior year was Andy, in his faded corduroy suit… There is so much of that quiet, shy, delightful kid, with so much talent in that portrait”. Executed as part of the ‘Oakland Project’, an assignment from a pictorial design course, Self-Portrait was selected for a 1948 Department of Painting and Design Exhibition. The penetrating stare from the clear blue eyes depict a young man on the verge of something big, while the pensive stance and slightly furrowed brow resemble the psychologically charged drawings of Egon Schiele. Warhol has the look of a young man determined to make it, to get the job in New York, to make a success of himself, ready ‘to be damned with what anybody else around you thinks’ – a pure original.