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Self-Portrait
Details
Andy Warhol (1928-1987)
Self-Portrait
stamped twice with the Estate of Andy Warhol stamp and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts stamp and numbered P040.067 (on the overlap)
synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen inks on canvas
79 x 79 in. (203 x 203 cm.)
Painted in 1986.
Self-Portrait
stamped twice with the Estate of Andy Warhol stamp and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts stamp and numbered P040.067 (on the overlap)
synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen inks on canvas
79 x 79 in. (203 x 203 cm.)
Painted in 1986.
Provenance
Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London
Private collection, Europe, 1997
Anon. sale; Christie's, New York, 8 November 2005, lot 33
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner
Private collection, Europe, 1997
Anon. sale; Christie's, New York, 8 November 2005, lot 33
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner
Exhibited
Barcelona, Joan Miró Foundation, Andy Warhol, June-November 1996.
London, Anthony D'Offay Gallery, Vanitas: skulls and self-portraits (1976-1986), November 1999-February 2000.
London, Anthony D'Offay Gallery, Vanitas: skulls and self-portraits (1976-1986), November 1999-February 2000.
Further Details
“If you want to know all about Andy Warhol,” Andy Warhol once said famously, “just look at the surface: of my paintings” (A. Warhol, quoted in K. McShine, Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1989, p. 457.) As one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th century, Andy Warhol unquestionably understood the power of a compelling image. But it was perhaps his own image, his own carefully cultivated, distinctive brand, which commanded the greatest magnetism of all. Self-Portrait is one of the last great series of works that Warhol ever made. In testament to their importance, other canvases in the series are now housed in prominent museum collections across the world, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas, and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Created in 1986 for an exhibition in London at the Anthony d’ Offay Gallery in July of that year, Warhol died unexpectedly just a few months after the work was shown. Nearly three decades later, the stark, haunting image of Warhol that stares out from the canvas, is as powerful and as poignant as ever. Depicted in highly contrasting, monochromatic tones, Warhol’s aged, pale face emerges from an engulfing, dense black void. He is wearing one of his many famously dramatic silver ‘fright wigs’, or ‘wig hats’, as the artist preferred to call them, which sticks theatrically upwards, like flames licking upwards into the dark surroundings. The wig’s stark whiteness has become one with the artist’s smooth, pallid skin. Shown with his mouth slightly open, and eyes that are large, penetrating, pools of darkness, Warhol’s gaze is confrontational and unsettling. Bold and brash, and yet a rare exposure for such a notoriously shy artist, Self-Portrait is simultaneously the work of an undisputed doyen of self-invention, a masterpiece from an experienced artist at the height of his prowess, and an image of an icon.
These self-portraits were made in the spring of 1986 at the suggestion of the London dealer Anthony d’Offay. Warhol, now a veteran of the art world, demonstrated great confidence by allowing the traditional dealer and artist relationship to be inverted, and agreed. “I was always saying to [Warhol], I want to do a big show of yours in London, ‘what would you like to show,’ d’Offay has said, and he would say to me ‘I’ll do whatever you want...’” (A. d’Offay, Tate Shots, Video, Tate Modern, London 2002). The paintings were a colossal success, and an important reminder of Warhol’s brilliance as a portrait artist. Warhol’s celebrity had faded somewhat since his 1960s heyday, and these paintings marked a return to form. “At Christmas,” d’Offay recalled, “we visited a collector friend of Lucio Amelio who had a powerful red portrait of Beuys by Andy Warhol hanging in his house. As I looked at the painting I realized 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 had not only 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. We agreed on the number of paintings and that some would have camouflage. 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 reminded him of our agreement. Without demur he made all the pictures again but with the image we had first selected. And so between us we brought two great series of self-portraits into the world” (A. d’Offay, quoted in Andy Warhol: Self-Portraits, exh. cat., Kunstverein St. Gallen Kunstmuseum, 2004, p.127).
Andy Warhol’s last great series of self-portraits remain some of the most moving and evocative works of his entire career. In this series a ghostly, disembodied, Warhol floats over the viewer again and again with the same implacable stare, wild hair, and piercing dark eyes. The spectral vision that Warhol presents of himself, seen in conjunction with their uncanny timing before his ill-fated operation, have lent these haunting paintings a prescience and significance that has done much to reinforce the myth of Warhol as a modern day seer. His disguise—his distinctive, peroxide wig—only reinforces his carefully cultivated mystery. By the time Warhol made these self-portraits, his own self-image was deliberately cultivated, and almost entirely artificial. The gaunt, delicate face seen in Self-Portrait hints at the mass of dermatological transformations he had undergone by this stage, for he had been tautened with astringents and smoothed with collagen injections. He had had plastic surgery on his nose, and he carried powders, cosmetics and creams for his skin with him everywhere. In spite of the remarkably large scale of and the simple, directness of his pose in this work, he is obscuring many aspects of his natural self with physical interventions. He is fiercely aware of his own vanity as he struggled, now in his late fifties, against the natural aging process in the public eye. Displaying his isolated face so openly, and with seeming alacrity, no other body of work by Warhol demonstrates the paradox presented by the artist’s self-consciousness and his celebrity status better than these late Self-Portraits. He knowingly is representing himself as both recognizable and disguised; a real person, made abstract by art. Robert Rosenblum, who has spoken eloquently of the spectral presence of death in these paintings, makes the profundity inherent to this series clear: “A sense of ultimate moment fills all these works, as well as a sense of stages artifice that, for a moment, can ward off the unstaged reality of death. Above all, spirit is about to conquer flesh, as if staring, frontal icon of Byzantine deity were created before our eyes.” (R. Rosenblum “Andy Warhol’s Masks”, in Andy Warhol: Self portraits, Dietmar Elger (ed.), Hannover, 2004, p. 37).
Visitors to the 1986 exhibition were similarly affected by the gravity of these works, especially displayed en masse. As the art critic David Bourdon has recalled about this exhibition, the initial reactions to the striking images of Warhol that these paintings provoked were strong, and many viewers left the show “deeply moved.” “Some spectators,” Bourdon wrote, “interpreted the pictures as momento mori, an unblinking, unsentimental view of a hurriedly approaching mortality. Others perceived them as a metaphor for the multiplicity of ways in which the artist was perceived” (D. Bourdon, Warhol, New York 1989, p. 402.) Not only was this coloured by the tragic event that was to follow the show, but also it had precedence in Warhol’s previous works. From his early career, death had been present as almost a leitmotif in his work. Warhol was acutely aware of his own temporality, and his preoccupation with death remained constant. From the monumental works that comprised the early 1960s Death and Disaster series—the Car Crashes, Suicides, Electric Chairs, and Race Riots, which were based on photos from tabloids and movie magazines - to the posthumous portraits of Marilyn Monroe, and through to the Endangered Species series in the early 1980s, his work extended this existential vision of the natural world. Not only was he neurotically afraid of germs, disease and hospitals, but in 1968 he had survived an assassination attempt, dying momentarily on the operating table. As he grew older, many of his closest friends fell victim to the newly discovered AIDS virus. “I paint pictures of myself,” he said once, “to remind myself that I’m still around” (A. Warhol quoted in V. Bockris, The Life and Death of Andy Warhol, London, 1989, p. 480).
Warhol, perhaps more than any other artist of the 20th century, was deeply engaged in the representation of his own likeness. His response to the noble tradition of self-portraiture was to create an engaging series of works that were seemingly anonymous and emotionally vacant, yet were in fact one of the most accurate depictions of an artist ever made. Indeed, more than any other artist of his generation, Warhol’s image, identity and cultural persona were inextricably linked to his art. For Warhol, identity is the role that one plays, the mask one chooses to wear. “I never like to give away my background and anyway, I make it different all the time I’m asked,” he stated (A. Warhol, quoted in G. Berg, “Andy Warhol: My True Story,” East Village Other, 1 November 1966). Emerging from the void, Warhol’s fright wig Self-Portraits are arguably, the work which establishes itself as the final icon of the famously enigmatic and often frighteningly clairvoyant persona that Warhol built for himself and presented to the world.
These self-portraits were made in the spring of 1986 at the suggestion of the London dealer Anthony d’Offay. Warhol, now a veteran of the art world, demonstrated great confidence by allowing the traditional dealer and artist relationship to be inverted, and agreed. “I was always saying to [Warhol], I want to do a big show of yours in London, ‘what would you like to show,’ d’Offay has said, and he would say to me ‘I’ll do whatever you want...’” (A. d’Offay, Tate Shots, Video, Tate Modern, London 2002). The paintings were a colossal success, and an important reminder of Warhol’s brilliance as a portrait artist. Warhol’s celebrity had faded somewhat since his 1960s heyday, and these paintings marked a return to form. “At Christmas,” d’Offay recalled, “we visited a collector friend of Lucio Amelio who had a powerful red portrait of Beuys by Andy Warhol hanging in his house. As I looked at the painting I realized 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 had not only 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. We agreed on the number of paintings and that some would have camouflage. 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 reminded him of our agreement. Without demur he made all the pictures again but with the image we had first selected. And so between us we brought two great series of self-portraits into the world” (A. d’Offay, quoted in Andy Warhol: Self-Portraits, exh. cat., Kunstverein St. Gallen Kunstmuseum, 2004, p.127).
Andy Warhol’s last great series of self-portraits remain some of the most moving and evocative works of his entire career. In this series a ghostly, disembodied, Warhol floats over the viewer again and again with the same implacable stare, wild hair, and piercing dark eyes. The spectral vision that Warhol presents of himself, seen in conjunction with their uncanny timing before his ill-fated operation, have lent these haunting paintings a prescience and significance that has done much to reinforce the myth of Warhol as a modern day seer. His disguise—his distinctive, peroxide wig—only reinforces his carefully cultivated mystery. By the time Warhol made these self-portraits, his own self-image was deliberately cultivated, and almost entirely artificial. The gaunt, delicate face seen in Self-Portrait hints at the mass of dermatological transformations he had undergone by this stage, for he had been tautened with astringents and smoothed with collagen injections. He had had plastic surgery on his nose, and he carried powders, cosmetics and creams for his skin with him everywhere. In spite of the remarkably large scale of and the simple, directness of his pose in this work, he is obscuring many aspects of his natural self with physical interventions. He is fiercely aware of his own vanity as he struggled, now in his late fifties, against the natural aging process in the public eye. Displaying his isolated face so openly, and with seeming alacrity, no other body of work by Warhol demonstrates the paradox presented by the artist’s self-consciousness and his celebrity status better than these late Self-Portraits. He knowingly is representing himself as both recognizable and disguised; a real person, made abstract by art. Robert Rosenblum, who has spoken eloquently of the spectral presence of death in these paintings, makes the profundity inherent to this series clear: “A sense of ultimate moment fills all these works, as well as a sense of stages artifice that, for a moment, can ward off the unstaged reality of death. Above all, spirit is about to conquer flesh, as if staring, frontal icon of Byzantine deity were created before our eyes.” (R. Rosenblum “Andy Warhol’s Masks”, in Andy Warhol: Self portraits, Dietmar Elger (ed.), Hannover, 2004, p. 37).
Visitors to the 1986 exhibition were similarly affected by the gravity of these works, especially displayed en masse. As the art critic David Bourdon has recalled about this exhibition, the initial reactions to the striking images of Warhol that these paintings provoked were strong, and many viewers left the show “deeply moved.” “Some spectators,” Bourdon wrote, “interpreted the pictures as momento mori, an unblinking, unsentimental view of a hurriedly approaching mortality. Others perceived them as a metaphor for the multiplicity of ways in which the artist was perceived” (D. Bourdon, Warhol, New York 1989, p. 402.) Not only was this coloured by the tragic event that was to follow the show, but also it had precedence in Warhol’s previous works. From his early career, death had been present as almost a leitmotif in his work. Warhol was acutely aware of his own temporality, and his preoccupation with death remained constant. From the monumental works that comprised the early 1960s Death and Disaster series—the Car Crashes, Suicides, Electric Chairs, and Race Riots, which were based on photos from tabloids and movie magazines - to the posthumous portraits of Marilyn Monroe, and through to the Endangered Species series in the early 1980s, his work extended this existential vision of the natural world. Not only was he neurotically afraid of germs, disease and hospitals, but in 1968 he had survived an assassination attempt, dying momentarily on the operating table. As he grew older, many of his closest friends fell victim to the newly discovered AIDS virus. “I paint pictures of myself,” he said once, “to remind myself that I’m still around” (A. Warhol quoted in V. Bockris, The Life and Death of Andy Warhol, London, 1989, p. 480).
Warhol, perhaps more than any other artist of the 20th century, was deeply engaged in the representation of his own likeness. His response to the noble tradition of self-portraiture was to create an engaging series of works that were seemingly anonymous and emotionally vacant, yet were in fact one of the most accurate depictions of an artist ever made. Indeed, more than any other artist of his generation, Warhol’s image, identity and cultural persona were inextricably linked to his art. For Warhol, identity is the role that one plays, the mask one chooses to wear. “I never like to give away my background and anyway, I make it different all the time I’m asked,” he stated (A. Warhol, quoted in G. Berg, “Andy Warhol: My True Story,” East Village Other, 1 November 1966). Emerging from the void, Warhol’s fright wig Self-Portraits are arguably, the work which establishes itself as the final icon of the famously enigmatic and often frighteningly clairvoyant persona that Warhol built for himself and presented to the world.
Sale Room Notice
This Lot is Withdrawn.
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