拍品专文
Andy Warhol attempted throughout his life to remain as impersonal and impassive as possible. Despite this self-effacement, he made self portraits throughout his career. Warhol relied on the relative lack of persona that photographs provide and used both photo-mats in the 1960s and polaroids in the 1970s to achieve his effects. Combined with silkscreen printing in one or two colors, these methods created the strange distancing that affects his work. Calvin Tomkin's 1970 essay concludes:
Ivan Karp suggests that Andy's reputation may rest on his face as on anything else - the pale cast of those Slavic features, sensitive/ugly, angelic/satanic, not quite of this world. One of the things he would have liked most, says another friend, was to have been beautiful. Perhaps he is. At the moment, though, what we seem to see reflected in that strange face is a sickness for which there may be no cure. This is the new shudder brought by Warhol's art. (C. Tomkins, "Raggedy Andy," in J. Coplans, Andy Warhol, New York 1970, p. 14).
Warhol's reputation has grown since his death; so much so that the strange color combinations of these images become haunting and somehow prescient. Carter Ratcliff wrote:
His Self-Portraits have changed over the years while remaining the same in their impenetrability.... During the 1970s his poses loosened up a bit, in concert with his new painterly style. There are a number of double and triple images among the Self-Portraits of that decade.... Sometimes he repeats the same shot when he imprints a canvas; elsewhere he offers two or three variations. In 1978 Warhol combined a profile of himself with a three-quarters and a seven-eighths view. For this canvas, he let the focus go soft, erasing most of the lines of his face. His expression is alert and open, if not quite friendly. He has made himself good-looking in a bland, unexceptional way. This Self-Portrait recalls Warhol's remark that he "always wanted Tab Hunter to play me in a story of my life-people would always be so much happier imagining that I was as handsome as... Tab....".(C. Ratcliff, Warhol, New York 1983, p. 97)
Alison to add info about rarity and use of this image
Ivan Karp suggests that Andy's reputation may rest on his face as on anything else - the pale cast of those Slavic features, sensitive/ugly, angelic/satanic, not quite of this world. One of the things he would have liked most, says another friend, was to have been beautiful. Perhaps he is. At the moment, though, what we seem to see reflected in that strange face is a sickness for which there may be no cure. This is the new shudder brought by Warhol's art. (C. Tomkins, "Raggedy Andy," in J. Coplans, Andy Warhol, New York 1970, p. 14).
Warhol's reputation has grown since his death; so much so that the strange color combinations of these images become haunting and somehow prescient. Carter Ratcliff wrote:
His Self-Portraits have changed over the years while remaining the same in their impenetrability.... During the 1970s his poses loosened up a bit, in concert with his new painterly style. There are a number of double and triple images among the Self-Portraits of that decade.... Sometimes he repeats the same shot when he imprints a canvas; elsewhere he offers two or three variations. In 1978 Warhol combined a profile of himself with a three-quarters and a seven-eighths view. For this canvas, he let the focus go soft, erasing most of the lines of his face. His expression is alert and open, if not quite friendly. He has made himself good-looking in a bland, unexceptional way. This Self-Portrait recalls Warhol's remark that he "always wanted Tab Hunter to play me in a story of my life-people would always be so much happier imagining that I was as handsome as... Tab....".(C. Ratcliff, Warhol, New York 1983, p. 97)
Alison to add info about rarity and use of this image