Andy Warhol

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1998

St. Gallen, Kunstmuseum; Hanover, Sprengel Museum, Selbstportraits / Self-Portraits, 2004, p. 79, illustrated in colour

The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant in the original and the illustration fails to convey fully the painterly quality of the surface. This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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Andy Warhol's 1978 Self-Portrait  occupies an important position in the evolution of self-depiction that so dramatically punctuated the artist's entire mature artistic career. With brilliant colour and Warhol's inimitable and expert dispersal of the silkscreen it broadcasts three different images of the artist simultaneously, incorporating the techniques of replication and multiplication for which his art is most famous in a brilliant and powerful rendition of the many facets of his extraordinary character. Continuing the legendary portrait series that preceded it – from those of Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy to Mao Zedong and Lenin – the present self-portrait reveals the artist grappling less with physiognomic likeness and more directly with the intangible qualities of fame, notoriety and celebrity. The three different poses struck by Warhol in the original Polaroid portraits that comprise the compositional structure of this work are apparently equally inscrutable, each containing a fixed stare that seems to be determinedly devoid of any legible emotion. Freed from the representational prerogatives of traditional portraiture, in Self-Portrait  Warhol's self-image becomes an impersonal motif to be explored in almost abstract terms, while also the vehicle to assess the impact of recognition in the depiction of the Self.

In direct contrast to the cool objectivity of his 1960s works, which sought to eradicate the energetic excesses of Abstract Expressionism with the objective reproduction and depersonalised flat surface of the mechanical silkscreen,Self-Portrait epitomises Warhol's later investigation into painterly texture as the backdrop for the liquid silkscreen ink and interrogates the semantics of colour via the lavish dispersal of brilliant pinks, greens and blues. Fluid brushstrokes and the emphatic tracings of finger-marks have manipulated the acrylic paint layers into a haptic surface full of lyrical movement, whose plastic dynamism recounts the gestural enthusiasm typical of Warhol's output at this time. The multiple layers of electric colours in matt acrylic are set in stark contrast against the polarised monochrome of glossy, reflective silkscreen ink. The entire work oscillates as the vibrant colour fields provide an unstable ground beneath the multiple portraits, like several frames of a film stilled and superimposed one on top of the other.

Whereas Warhol's earliest silkscreen subject matter were found images lifted from the mass-reproduced media of newspapers, magazines, and advertising, the imagery of Self-Portrait  is based on three Polaroid photographs. Here Warhol creates his own icon, independently engineering emblematic imagery that had previously been supplied to him by the machines of media and advertising. This work was executed after Warhol's renowned Factory had recently moved from 33 Union Square West to a much larger space at 860 Broadway. The improved environment facilitated the ideological zenith of Warhol's 'production' method: he conceived iconic images before collaborating with his team of assistants to multiply these via the silkscreen. Having been initiated in the early 1960s, this approach was now perfected, creating the most exciting and prodigious working environment.

From his earliest photo-booth self-portraits to the final Fright-Wig series, the genre of self-portraiture proved a continual focus for Warhol's output. His self-depictions work as vehicles for the major themes of his work, from image repetition and celebrity to the implication of mortality. Indeed,Self-Portrait extends the synchronicity between the artist's corpus of self-depiction and his fascination with mortality and the transience of existence that, of course, populates much of his entire oeuvre. From the outset Warhol's art had been driven by his obsession with the fragility of life and inspired his most powerful and celebrated works of the 1960s. The shadow of death appears both as explicit horror in Car Crashes, Suicides, and Race Riots, and as implicit tragedy in Electric Chairs, Marilyns  and Jackies. These 'Death and Disaster' works interrogate how death can act as the agent of celebrity; the anomalies of terrifying and catastrophic events fuelling the infatuation of the unaffected majority.

Warhol also had a complicated attitude towards his own appearance and he suffered terribly under the self-destructive belief that he was unattractive. Nevertheless, at the same time his self-styled exterior was already immensely famous and remains instantly recognizable. The extraordinary cycle of Self-Portraiture he produced throughout his career demonstrates a semiotic relationship between the signifier of fame and the referent of personality that transcends conventionally mapped correlations between appearance and attractiveness. Self-Portrait  presents Andy Warhol as the artistic phenomenon: amid the three versions of his physiognomy we perceive the legend of Warhol rather than appraise the features of an anonymous fifty year old man. Indeed, Warhol's fascination with this dynamic was further manifest through the magazine Interview  that he had founded in 1969: despite their radically different appearances, the stars that look out from the covers of the 1970s editions encompass the full cast of glamorous celebrities that defined what was then deemed attractive.

At the same time, the present work embodies a startlingly frank confrontation with the notion of Self. As with some contemporaneous photographs, such asSelf Portrait (in Blue Shirt, Eyes Staring) of 1977-78, it is almost as if Warhol's stock-still and wide-eyed blankness has frozen character completely out of his face, purposefully aligning his already skeletal features with the appearance of an actual skull. Furthermore, with Polaroid self-portraits that show a skull balancing either on top of his head or on his shoulder Warhol admits the death head as a parallel or even substitute to his self. Warhol once said that "Death can really make you look like a star" (the artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Bilbao, Guggenheim, Andy Warhol, A Factory, 2000, n.p.), and there can be little doubt that following the artist's shooting, the idea of a memento mori to himself cannot have been far from his mind when he created the present work.