Andy Warhol

Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London
Galerie Isy Brachot, Brussels
Christie's, London, December 10, 1998, Lot 552
Gunter Sachs, Switzerland (acquired from the above)
Sotheby's, London, The Gunter Sachs Collection, May 22, 2012, Lot 18
Acquired by the present owner from the above

London, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, Andy Warhol, 1986
New York, Dia Art Foundation, Andy Warhol: Skulls 1976, 1987 
Brussels, Galerie Isy Brachot, Andy Warhol, 1989, p. 35, illustrated in color and illustrated in color on the cover 
New York, Museum of Modern Art; Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago; London, Hayward Gallery; Cologne, Museum Ludwig; Venice, Palazzo Grassi; Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, February 1989 - September 1990, cat. no. 113, p. 147, illustrated 
Lucerne, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Andy Warhol: Paintings 1960-1986, July - September 1995, cat. no. 1, illustrated
New York, Van de Weghe Fine Art, Andy Warhol: Self-Portraits 1963-1986, April - May 2005, cat. no. 35, p. 77, illustrated in color
Leipzig, Museum der Bildenden Künste, Gunter Sachs, 2008, p. 122, illustrated in color
Moscow, Museum Tsaritsyno, Gunter Sachs, 2009 

This painting is in excellent condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art department at 212-606-7254 for the condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The canvas is not framed.
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With the passing of every year since his premature death at the age of just fifty-nine, the enduring relevance and sheer authority of Andy Warhol’s art continues to permeate, influence, and define our contemporary culture. Warhol’s eye was focused to a point on perceiving the reality hidden beneath the surface. With inexorable accuracy he identified and exposed truths of our society that had been obscured by layers of presentation. Whether revealing the intention behind a gleaming patina of brilliant branding and advertising; the manipulation underneath a veil of desensitized photo-journalistic apathy; or the personal tragedy hidden within the artificial architecture of celebrity, Warhol’s genius was to lay bare the facts of how our existence is governed. Spanning the arenas of capitalist consumerism, the mechanics of mass-media, the specter of everyday mortality, and the vagaries of constructed stardom, Warhol was, quite simply, obsessed with surface. And in 1986, just months before his unexpected and tragic early death, Warhol pulled back the surface of his ultimate subject and delivered the definitive self-portrait.

Here more than in any other of his Self-Portraits, Warhol tackled the challenge of self-depiction with an unrivalled and up-close intensity, presenting an image both of Warhol the man and Warhol the artistic phenomenon. Warhol exposed his starkly isolated, distinctive appearance to our sharp scrutiny in unparalleled photographic detail. His last Self-Portrait catalogued the transformation in his ageing features in dialogue with the technical transformation in his art from maverick to master. Using his face as an arena for technical and compositional experimentation, by now Warhol had harnessed and honed to sheer perfection the silkscreen process which he had introduced to fine art practice in the early 1960s. Here the brilliant pink image is of such controlled clarity that it resounds in our memory even when we cease to look. The silkscreen captures every minutia and contour of Warhol's features, from his sunken cheeks, his pursed lip, and that incredibly penetrating stare. If Warhol's credo was the seductive surface, here it reaches its apogee, in the flawlessly slick, black, even lamina of ink which lends the works a surface unity worthy of the clean, flat surfaces predicated by Minimalism. Unlike his works from the 1970s which had thick, brushy acrylic surfaces, here Warhol returned to the ineluctable flatness of the picture plane.

Warhol had an obsessive preoccupation with sudden death, even before Valerie Solanas entered the Factory and shot him, nearly killing him, on June 3rd, 1968. This morbid fascination is openly reflected in his work, especially in the often gruesome Death and Disaster and Electric Chair series. Here, the mysterious image of the artist's gaunt features reflects this lifelong fascination with the transience of life, and seems to convey an awareness of his own impending death. While there is no way that Warhol could have known what fate had in store for him, there is an almost tangible sense of the ageing artist confronting his own mortality. As John Caldwell noted of Warhol's last series, "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." (John Caldwell, "A New Andy Warhol at the Carnegie," Carnegie Magazine, Pittsburgh, January - February 1987, p. 9)

Warhol made the first self-portrait of his mature career in 1963, in which his appearance is masked by dark glasses and the graininess of the then new screen-printing process, followed by a subsequent small series in 1964, similarly based on a photo-booth source photograph. The emergence of the Self-Portraits charted a turning point for Warhol: now, among the images of the rich and famous, he became an icon in his own visual repertoire. By 1966, the year of his third great series of self-images, he was a star in his own right; an artist, musician, and increasingly acclaimed film maker whose constructed public persona was almost as famous as his artistic production. Propelled into the public limelight, the world now bestowed on him the same degree of celebrity status that he found so intriguing and captivating in those that he chose to depict. In his archetypal 1966 portraits, at once iconic and iconoclastic, Warhol succeeded in capturing on canvas the most alluring and elusive star in his firmament of celebrity: himself. It was not until twenty years later, in the series to which the present work belongs, that Warhol would find an equivalently powerful self-image. While in the 1960s, Warhol was an aloof commentator on the consumer culture that was sweeping through an economically prosperous America, by the time of the present work he and his art had become synonymous with contemporary American culture itself. Such was his fame and the success of his artistic vision that it shaped the worlds of art, fashion, film, and the media throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In his last Self-Portraits, the ever insightful commentator packages and presents himself as a product to be consumed by the machinery of the commodity culture which he himself helped to define.

While the 1963 and 1964 Self-Portraits were based on a photo-mat strip of photographs, in the 1986 series Warhol used a Polaroid photograph as his source image, a technique which he had refined in his portraiture throughout the 1970s. Wearing a black turtle-neck sweater and one of his many elaborate wigs, in his diaries Warhol recalled the making of the image: "At the office Sam tried to take pictures of me that I needed to work from for the self-portraits for the English show, and I'd done my hair in curlers and everything and he just couldn't get it right." (the artist cited in Jennifer Higgie, 'Andy Warhol' in Frieze, 5^th September 1996) Comparing the final canvases to the original image, it is evident that Warhol chose the image in which his top best covered his neck. In this way, Warhol made his body disappear entirely, so that his severed head hovers in space.

Warhol’s acclaimed series of final portraits was first unveiled by Anthony d'Offay at his London gallery in July 1986, the first and only show in Warhol's career dedicated to the theme of self-portraiture. The revered gallerist subsequently recalled the genesis of the series: "I realised two things: first that Warhol was without question the greatest portrait painter of the 20th century, and secondly that it was many years since he had made an iconic self-portrait. A week later I visited Warhol in New York and suggested to him an exhibition of new self-portraits. A month later he had a series of images to show me in all of which he was wearing the now famous 'fright wig'. One of the images not only had a demonic aspect but reminded me more of a death mask. I felt it was tempting fate to choose this image, so we settled instead on a self-portrait with a hypnotic intensity." (Anthony d'Offay cited in Exh. Cat., Kunstverein St. Gallen, Kunstmuseum, Andy Warhol, Self Portraits, 2004, p. 131) This remarkable image became the anchor for one of his greatest exhibitions in a commercial gallery. Today, works from this landmark exhibition grace the collections of Tate Modern, London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.