Andy Warhol

"Your looks are responsible for a certain part of your fame – they feed the imagination."  Carter Ratcliff, Warhol, New York, 1983, p. 53

When Warhol painted his 1966-677 Self-Portrait, he captured his most alluring and elusive star: himself. Painting at the height of his early fame, following the overwhelming success of his exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Self-Portrait marks the conjunction of Warhol's celebrity subject matter and his personal fame - an ironic layering of subject and author. Warhol's celebrity was gained through the popularity of his appropriated images of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Jackie Kennedy, among others - depicting their public persona with the same cool style as the other consumer products that populated his early canvasses. Like the Campbell's Soup Cans, the celebrities were imprinted in our cultural consciousness not as individuals but as marketable icons. By painting his self-portrait, Warhol went a step further by incorporating his growing presence in the media into his oeuvre. Feeding the public appetite for celebrity, he bestowed his own image with the iconic statue of a superstar. Thus, unlike any artist before him, Warhol's image, identity and cultural persona were inextricably tied to his art.

The silkscreen process was ideally suited to Warhol's temperament, as he was seeking to distance himself from the painterly process. Using mechanically printed images derived from photographs, Warhol found an alternative to the traditional hand-painted canvas that combined his graphic talents and his adoption of an ironic, voyeuristic pose in contemporary society.  By choosing his own image as subject, and by posing in a classic, male movie star fashion, Warhol is ironically mythologizing himself. Self-Portrait offers an image of the artist as celluloid-worthy and sultry as any leading man, photographed in the half-shadow of the dramatic movie studio still of the 1930s and 1940s. Yet, the shadow also serves to obscure his features, preserving the cool and detached pose with an unabashedly distant and indistinct gaze.

At the urging of Ivan Karp, Warhol painted his first series of self-portraits in 1964. Karp had reminded the artist that "people want to see you. Your looks are responsible for a certain part of your fame - they feed the imagination." (Carter Ratcliff, Warhol, New York, 1983, p. 53). The 1964 paintings, based on the photo-booth pictures of the artist in disheveled, quirky poses, are in sharp contrast to the more subtly complex 1966 self-portraits. As Carter Ratcliff observed, "the 1964 self-portraits are warm-ups for the ones that Warhol made two years later, which now serve as icons of the Pop era - blank, yet intricately articulated, with their rough screenprinting, garish colours, and the peculiar dignity with which Warhol rests his chin in his hand. One of his fingers crosses his lips, as if to repeat the injunction of the Electric Chair paintings - 'silence'." (Ibid., p. 52)

Warhol's painting remains an essentially modern articulation of structure and form. In this particular canvas, the uniform, planar deep chocolate ground is starkly in contrast to the vibrant plum coloured screening of Warhol and his shadow. Broken down into bold abstract passages, the unarticulated features are nevertheless seared into our mind's eye with the force of the contrasting positive/negative of his palette. In this 1966-67 self-portrait series, Warhol for the first time, abandons the suggestion of pink flesh-coloured tones, and blond or black hair. As in the coloured Campbell's Soup Cans series of 1965, Warhol transforms one of his signature subjects through a prism of 1960's Day-Glo colours, adapting the image to the times that swirled more and more around him in his fame and celebrity.