- 21
安迪·沃荷
描述
- 安迪·沃荷
- 《自畫像》
- 款識:藝術家簽名(畫布側邊)
- 壓克力彩、絲印油墨畫布
- 22 x 22 英寸;55.9 x 55.9 公分
- 1966 - 1967年作
來源
Jay Johnson and Tom Cashin, New York (acquired from the above in 1996)
Thomas Ammann Fine Art AG, Zurich (acquired from the above in 2010)
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 2010
出版
Condition
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.
拍品資料及來源
For more than twenty years of his prodigious mature career, from his earliest series of Self-Portraits in 1963 to the final haunting examples of 1986, Andy Warhol determinedly and serially chronicled his own visage, creating a corpus of work that charts the course of his own legendary status. The emergence of the Self-Portraits signaled a turning point for Warhol: now, among the images of the rich and famous, he became an icon in his own visual repertoire. In 1963, the collector Florence Barron commissioned the artist’s first mature Self-Portrait, which was modeled on the portraits of Ethel Scull that he had created only months earlier. Using a series of photo booth images as his source, his countenance is masked by dark sunglasses and the graininess of the then-new screen-printing process. Warhol appears in these early canvases in a sequence of diverse poses, a compositional tactic that allowed him to explore the possibilities of variation within serial repetition. Like his spectacular multi-canvas Jackie paintings, these works possess a strong sense of temporality, resembling film strips that chronicle the passage of time. In his second series of Self-Portraits, from 1964, Warhol still used a photo booth image as his source, but chose only one exposure, effectively abandoning any reference to temporality. This single exposure was screened onto the surface of each of the ten canvases in the series in precisely the same way, with the only differentiation being the background color, which was applied locally by hand in the same manner as Warhol’s seminal paintings of late 1962 and early 1963, such as Troy, Marilyn, and Liz. It is this 1964 group that presages the single exposure portraits and progressively experimental approach to color that Warhol would ultimately arrive at in works such as Self-Portrait.
By 1966, the year of his third and greatest series of self-images, Warhol’s 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. For these Self-Portraits, Warhol abandoned the photo booth source images which, with their rapidly timed exposures, encouraged the kind of spontaneous mugging poses seen in his earliest series. Instead, he used a print photograph of himself in a pose that appears carefully calculated and fine-tuned, perfectly capturing Robert Rosenblum’s declaration that, "From the beginning, Warhol offered a contradictory balance between up-close intimacy and calculated artifice." (Robert Rosenblum, Andy Warhol: Self-Portraits, St. Gallen, 2004, p. 21) Warhol’s direct gaze pierces through this striking image. The simple black turtleneck that he wears places strong visual emphasis on his face and his left hand, which is purposefully positioned so that his middle and index fingers create a V-shape at his mouth. The masking function of the sunglasses in his 1963 Self-Portrait is here replaced by the dark shadow that obscures nearly the entirety of the proper right side of his face, shrouding him in an aura of mystery and preventing us from any complete reading of his visage. This shadow, when reproduced on a halftone screen as in the present work, reads as an essentially opaque field, and the perfect compositional contrast to the highlights that appear in the hair on the opposite side of his head. Warhol’s abounding interest in engaging a wide spectrum of colors in his 1960s silkscreened paintings reaches a spectacular apex in these works, and Self-Portrait is exemplary of the innovations that he exacted in this most influential of his Self-Portrait series: here, the dazzling vibrancy of the red, turquoise, cyan and purple tones transforms the purpose of color from supporting the image to becoming, if only at first glance, the compositional star and visual exclamation point of the painting. In his seminal 1966 portraits, at once iconic and iconoclastic, Warhol succeeds in capturing on canvas the most alluring and elusive star in his firmament of celebrity: himself.
More than any artist before him, Warhol’s image, identity and constructed public persona were inextricably bound to his art, making the Self-Portraits among the richest and most fertile sites for his artistic invention. Witnessing the conjunction of Warhol’s celebrity subject matter and his personal fame, they result in an ironic layering of subject and author. Renowned for his candid depictions of stage and screen luminaries, Warhol capitalized on the mechanics of an increasingly consumer-driven society when he packaged and commodified Marilyn, Elvis and Liz as marketable icons. Openly acknowledging the artifice and deception inherent in any form of representation, Warhol, in his 1960s Self-Portraits, presented himself as a constructed fiction, a series of personas as affected and contrived as his own public image. In doing so, his 1967 statement, grossly disingenuous at the time, finally came true: “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, March 17, 1967, p. 3)