Skull

Powerfully conveying one of the legendary twentieth-century artist’s most intimate and contemplative motifs, Andy Warhol’s Skull is a choice example from his important series of Skull paintings begun in 1976. Inaugurating the final decade of Warhol’s life, Skull confronts the viewer with an unvarnished portrayal of its titular subject, operating as a memento mori reflecting on death’s inevitability. The work enthralls with an intense contrast of color, from the glittering gold background and vivid green foreground to the jet-black shadows and piercing voids of the skull. Rendered after a series of black-and-white photographs taken by Warhol’s assistant Ronnie Cutrone of a skull apparently acquired from a Paris taxidermy studio, the work meditates on the themes of mortality, vanitas, and temporality which pervaded the artist’s output after surviving Valerie Solanas’s assassination attempt in 1968. While recapitulating the motifs which had driven his early fascination with death and celebrity, the Skull series marked an important new trajectory in Warhol’s work. The skull was the first in a series of macabre subjects which Warhol would confront in his late career. Musing on the concept of death in his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, published one year prior to the present work, Warhol writes: “I don’t believe in it, because you’re not around to know that it’s happened. I can’t say anything about it because I’m not prepared for it” (A. Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), New York, 1975, p. 123). The themes embedded in Skull are currently the focus of a major travelling exhibition, Andy Warhol: Vanitas, organized by The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

With Skull, Warhol resuscitates the longstanding still life vanitas tradition, using the skull as a poignant visual reminder of one’s mortality. Cutrone confirmed the art historical positioning of the series, noting, “yeah, it’s like the classic still life; only there won’t be anything else, there will just be this big skull—and it’s everybody’s portrait in the world” (R. Cutrone, quoted in The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings, 1976-1978, 5A, New York, 2018, p. 27). Contemporaneous with other still life series, including the Hammer and Sickle paintings, the present work demonstrates his formal interest in scale and monumentality, the artist employing skillful lighting and framing in order to emphasize the monumental presence of the skull in his moderately-sized canvases. Curiously the shadow of the skull in the present work casts the profile of a baby’s face onto the surface upon which it sits. Many have seen this as an allusion to rebirth, an optimistic outlook of this important image. Warhol thickly laid paint across the surface of the painting, modelling the paint layers with his fingers to emphasize the contours and edges of the skull, dramatizing the already strong shadows captured in his reference photograph. Warhol’s still life similarly removes extraneous subjects from the composition, removing any distraction from his intense focus on the skull. Comparing Warhol’s example to antecedents, one art historian notes, “Dutch still-life painters placed realistically rendered skulls, with jawbones and teeth missing, in the midst of luxurious displays of expensive silver and luscious fruit to warn viewers about the transience of the sensual world. Warhol, however, presents an even starker image of the inevitability and mystery of death… there is no sensual world to enjoy, only a skull, complete with jawbone, who laughingly confronts us.” (A. K. Wheelock Jr., quoted in, Andy Warhol: 365 Takes, New York, 2004, p. 312).

Warhol kept the present work with him until his death in 1987, infusing this Skull with even greater poignancy. The artist had long been concerned with death, focusing on the subject in his renderings of car crashes and dead celebrities in his early career. Warhol reframed mortality with typical irony when he pithily quipped how “death can really make you look like a star” (A. Warhol, quoted in Andy Warhol. A Factory, exh. cat., Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, 2000, n.p.). Warhol intensified this focus after barely surviving being shot in 1968, his heart momentarily ceasing to beat on the operating table. As Stephen Koch describes, “in Warhol’s sense of things, he had died then been brought back, as if God has reconsidered and on second thought returned his life on loan... he would live the rest of his life feeling a sense of metaphysical specialness and an accompanying metaphysical terror” (S. Koch, Stargazer: The Life, World, and Films of Andy Warhol, New York, 1991, p. ii). With Skull, Warhol confronts the specter of his own mortality head-on, just like Hamlet, who, contemplating a skull held in his hands, moans, “Alas, poor Yorick!” (W. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 5, Scene I).