.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Andy Warhol's Self-Portrait of 1964 finds its genesis in a simple, unembellished snap shot taken at a Times Square four-for-a-quarter photo-booth. Many of his early portraits share this origin, including his famous work Ethel Scull 36 Times, and it is in the Scull Collection that Self-Portrait found its first home. Warhol loved the Pop aesthetic of the photo-booth picture. He loved that there was no artist's hand present in the making--the image owed its existence to mechanical reproduction, like a product label. The mechanical process also distanced him from his subject, a reluctance of intimacy he liked, even with himself. The unstudied spontaneity of the image was particularly appealing as well, as Warhol liked the ease in which an icon could be made. When Warhol liked a photograph, he often had it processed into a twenty-by-sixteen inch silkscreen.
Self-Portrait is an arresting work--two clear, crisp screen prints on canvas placed side by side by the artist. One is red, the other, blue. The eyes are colored to correspond to the color of the respective background, and they bear reference to the Mona Lisa, as it is easy to imagine one pair of red and one pair of blue eyes seeming to follow the viewer around the room. In both, his hair is silver and his skin is pink, echoing his unusual look in real life. The artist is seen in a frontal view, looking as flat and two-dimensional as possible. Mimicking the serial nature of his Campbell soup cans, Brillo boxes, Coca-Cola bottles, and even Jasper John's Painted Bronze, Ballantine Ale cans side-by-side, Warhol sought to render himself without uniqueness and character, as if to say even his own image could be a Pop subject matter, in perfect repetition.
Self-Portrait, 1964 is a testament to Warhol's love of repetition and in particular the leitmotiv of pairing. In many works, Elvis, Liz, Jackie, Liza and Andy, two is the operative number for the success of the work. His works of two images can be more powerful than those that group many screens because these works emphasize a basic Pop tenet--if a single image is perceived to be unique, then two side-by-side, appearing identical must surely be massed produced. No other examples of this portrait exist as a pair or in any other multiple configurations, highlighting the importance of this work in illustrating Warhol's ideas of seriality and the duality of singularity and sameness.
Of all of Warhol's self-portraits, (and there are at least ten different versions of Andy that stand out through the artist's thirty some years of production), this one is remarkable as it is the least performative in nature. No glasses, no trench coat, no hand over the mouth in sissy thoughtfulness, no fright wig--just Andy as a young man looking as he might on a driver's license--twice-with piercing red and blue eyes.
Fig. 1 Photobooth photograph of Warhol, c. 1963
c 2002 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/ARS, New York
Fig. 2 Photograph of Warhol with two Self-Portraits
c 2002 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/ARS, New York
Self-Portrait is an arresting work--two clear, crisp screen prints on canvas placed side by side by the artist. One is red, the other, blue. The eyes are colored to correspond to the color of the respective background, and they bear reference to the Mona Lisa, as it is easy to imagine one pair of red and one pair of blue eyes seeming to follow the viewer around the room. In both, his hair is silver and his skin is pink, echoing his unusual look in real life. The artist is seen in a frontal view, looking as flat and two-dimensional as possible. Mimicking the serial nature of his Campbell soup cans, Brillo boxes, Coca-Cola bottles, and even Jasper John's Painted Bronze, Ballantine Ale cans side-by-side, Warhol sought to render himself without uniqueness and character, as if to say even his own image could be a Pop subject matter, in perfect repetition.
Self-Portrait, 1964 is a testament to Warhol's love of repetition and in particular the leitmotiv of pairing. In many works, Elvis, Liz, Jackie, Liza and Andy, two is the operative number for the success of the work. His works of two images can be more powerful than those that group many screens because these works emphasize a basic Pop tenet--if a single image is perceived to be unique, then two side-by-side, appearing identical must surely be massed produced. No other examples of this portrait exist as a pair or in any other multiple configurations, highlighting the importance of this work in illustrating Warhol's ideas of seriality and the duality of singularity and sameness.
Of all of Warhol's self-portraits, (and there are at least ten different versions of Andy that stand out through the artist's thirty some years of production), this one is remarkable as it is the least performative in nature. No glasses, no trench coat, no hand over the mouth in sissy thoughtfulness, no fright wig--just Andy as a young man looking as he might on a driver's license--twice-with piercing red and blue eyes.
Fig. 1 Photobooth photograph of Warhol, c. 1963
c 2002 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/ARS, New York
Fig. 2 Photograph of Warhol with two Self-Portraits
c 2002 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/ARS, New York