Andy Warhol

Executed in 1986 in the months preceding Andy Warhol’s untimely death at the age of 58, the artist’s final series of self-portraits are among the most intense and iconic works of his career. Often referred to as the ‘fright-wig’ portraits, this bold series immortalises the mysterious and enigmatic artistic persona that Warhol had meticulously cultivated throughout his career.  

Here more than in any other of his self-portraits, Warhol tackles the challenge of self-depiction with an unrivalled and up-close theatricality, presenting an image not of Warhol the man but of Warhol the artistic phenomenon. Mirroring his development from the position of the detached observer in the early 1960s to a media star of his era, Warhol's self-portraits occupy a position of central importance within the artist’s oeuvre. From the earliest photo-booth works of 1964 (fig. 2) to this last iconic series, Warhol continually used self-portraiture as a means of reflecting his social position and status. Employing a variety of props and pictorial devices such as shadows and wigs to create an ever evolving landscape of the ‘self’, Warhol’s self-portraits reflect his famous comment that, “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; there’s nothing in between.” (the artist cited in Gretchen Berg, ‘Andy: My True Story,’ in Los Angeles Free Press, 17 March 1967, p. 3)

In the present work Warhol exposes his starkly isolated, distinctive visage to our scrutiny in crisp photographic detail. Based on polaroid photographs of the artist wearing a polo-neck sweater (fig. 1), Warhol’s seemingly body-less head hovers against the black impenetrable background. The intensity of his silver features shows an openness and frontality that surpasses any of his earlier self-portraits. This mysterious image of the artist’s gaunt features reflects the artist’s lifelong fascination with the transience of life, and seems to convey an awareness of his own impending death. Depicting himself as if on the brink of eternity, Warhol here evokes a feeling of the supernatural through the vibrantly contrasting composition. 

Warhol’s preference for repetition through series in his self-portraits contradicts the genre’s traditional ideal of intimate expression through a single, unique image. Traditionally viewed as exposing the private side of a public profession, the artificiality of the image here challenges the ideals of unedited, private revelation conventionally associated with self-portraiture. Like Rembrandt who created a mini-canon within his oeuvre by constantly returning to his own visage, Warhol transformed his own likeness into an arena for technical and compositional experimentation. As a collective group, Warhol’s self-portraits map his artistic transformation from the young maverick to the celebrated master. Perhaps more than any other 20^th-Century artist, Warhol was a public figure whose image and personality intrigued and fascinated people as much as his art. Because of this, the self-portraits uniquely represent the shared ground between Warhol the celebrity and Warhol the artist, and moreover, they are crucial to our understanding of both. After years of reinvention, surgery and wigs, by this stage in his life Warhol’s face had become as iconic and glamorous as the celebrities he had first immortalised.  As David Bourdon observes, “Warhol’s visage by this time was, of course, almost totally invented: the hair belonged to one of dozens of wigs, the skin had been dermatologicaly transformed and constantly taughtened through the use of astringents, and the sunken cheeks had been smoothed out with collagen injections (contrary to rumours, Warhol never had a facelift; his fear of the surgeons scalpel made him forego that treatment).” (David Bourdon, Andy Warhol, New York 1989, p. 402)

Executed more than twenty years after the last of the artist’s great self-portraits, this series has a foreboding sense of absoluteness and derives its power from the sense we are being given a rare chance to witness the passing of an icon. Widely regarded as the artist’s last great artistic gesture, the present work from this luminous series puts forward the final piece in the gloriously complex and diverse puzzle that is Warhol’s life and oeuvre. Commissioned by Anthony D’Offay and unveiled at his gallery in July 1986, the gallerist fondly recalls 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 … When I returned to New York some weeks later the paintings were complete. The only problem was that Warhol had painted the demonic ‘Hammer House of Horror’ image rather than the one we had chosen. I remonstrated with him and … without demur he made all the paintings again but with the image we had first selected. And so between us we brought two great series of self portraits into the world.” (Anthony D’Offay, cited in Exhibition Catalogue, Andy Warhol, Self Portraits, Kunstverein St. Gallen, Kunstmuseum, 2004 p. 131)

The present Self-Portrait with Warhol’s hair standing on end is from the first and most powerful series of paintings: the ones chosen by Warhol. As Warhol’s friend and biographer David Bourdon recalled, the public’s immediate reaction to these works when they were exhibited was one of shock, with many viewers leaving the show deeply moved. “Some spectators interpreted the pictures as a memento mori, an unblinking, unsentimental view of a hurriedly approaching mortality. Others perceived them for the multiplicity of ways in which the artist was perceived.” (David Bourdon, Warhol, New York 1989, p. 402) 

Self-Portrait epitomises the artist’s lifelong concern with image and identity, and depicts the image of an artist who had become more famous than the legion of celebrity sitters he had painted. Throughout his career, Warhol’s self-portraits afford a series of theatrical masks, which even when seeming to confront the viewer with alarming intensity, serve to shield the artist from our gaze. In this, his last series, Warhol goes one step further to give the impression that it is in fact he who is observing us.