Since I started these “My Favorite Things” posts I’ve known at some point I’d eventually get around to writing about a piece by Andy Warhol. I’ve been a fan for the vast majority of my life and have probably seen more pieces of original art by him than by any other artist. I assumed I would be writing about a silkscreen painting from the 1960s, a piece made during what he referred to as the “crazy, druggy” period of the Factory – one of his Most Wanted Men or a Car Crash or a Suicide. Nevertheless, as I pondered his oeuvre, my thoughts kept returning to his Self-Portraits from 1986.

I first became aware of these late Self-Portraits in May 1987, when one appeared on the cover of Art in America. It was just two or three months after Warhol died, and this image – his gaunt face glowing red, emerging from the darkness of the great beyond, his piercing stare a warning, or a challenge – confronted me from the magazine rack at Tower Books, and I gasped. Warhol was only in his late fifties when he made these paintings, but the sense of mortality they convey is palpable, as if he knew his death was imminent.¹

Although in various books and magazines I would see many other reproductions of the 1986 Self-Portraits in different colors and based on different photographs, it wasn’t until 2002 at the Andy Warhol Retrospective exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art that I first saw actual examples from the series.² In addition to a hand-painted black-and-white version, the show featured several silkscreen paintings – a six-panel, multi-colored polyptych and an 80” square purple piece. These Self-Portraits have the authoritatively and aggressively factual quality that had been missing from much of Warhol’s work since the 1960s.

Contemporaneously with the Self-Portraits, Warhol produced a series of Camouflage paintings, which are notable for being simultaneously non-objective and also of a specific image. During the last ten or so years of his life, Warhol actually created several “abstract” series – the Camouflage paintings are, by and large, the most successful.³ In addition to the use of camouflage in all-over compositions, a la Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, which they resemble, he utilized the pattern in conjunction with figurative imagery, as well, including some of the Self-Portraits.

I learned of the self-portrait/camouflage paintings in 1989, when I purchased David Bourdon’s monograph Warhol⁴ and the catalogue to the Andy Warhol: A Retrospective exhibition,⁵ both of which include a reproduction of one. The first actual example I saw was similar to the piece in A Retrospective – a green/gray/black camouflage variation – at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in From A to B and Back Again in 2019. I spent more time in front of that painting than I did looking at any other post-’60s work in the show.

The strongest of the 1986 Self-Portraits are not only on a par with Warhol’s best work from the ’60s, but are also among the most powerful self-portraits made by anyone, ever. As to which is my favorite among the many diverse pieces in the series, the red painting that appeared on the Art in America cover still has the ability, even in reproduction, to take my breath away. I find it to be the most potent of the single-color-plus-black paintings in the series – not because it was the first with which I became familiar, but because it very well may be the best.

However, the self-portrait/camouflage pieces are particularly effective, as the camouflage adds the intimation that there is more present than what one can see – that the “Andy Warhol” persona is a cover.⁶ I haven’t seen any actual red/pink camouflage variations like the one pictured in Bourdon’s book, but based on the reproductions, I prefer them to the other camouflage color combinations.⁷ With the predominance of red, they echo the red painting I like so much, and they also feature the stark black backgrounds that contribute to the immediacy of the image.

This red/pink camouflage Self-Portrait, along with others from the series and some of his concurrent Camouflage and Last Supper paintings, suggests that Warhol was invigorated and, had he lived, could have entered an artistic renaissance in the third act of his career. If only.

 

¹ Admittedly, although Warhol’s death hit me pretty hard, fifty-eight seemed pretty old at the time – such is the folly of youth. Death was a recurring theme in Warhol’s art throughout his career, starting with the hand-painted 129 Die in Jet (Plane Crash) in 1962.

² I would later see others in Andy Warhol: Portraits at the Crocker Art Museum (2016) and in From A to B and Back Again at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2019).

³ The others are the Oxidation, Shadow, Egg, Yarn, and Rorschach works, all of which are still relatively unknown.

⁴ Abrams, 1989. If one could only own one book on Warhol, this wouldn’t be a bad choice – lots of color reproductions and documentary photographs, an informative and entertaining text, plus a hysterical front cover photo of Warhol in a closet.

⁵ The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1989. Although I was aware of the show during its two runs in the US, I did not see it. Sadly, a trip to New York City or Chicago just wasn’t in the cards.

⁶ Although this would seem to be obvious, over the years I’ve heard many rants about things he’d said, even though he was rarely able to stay completely in character – sometimes he could barely contain his laughter.

⁷ When these paintings were made, red and pink was an unfamiliar and unexpected color scheme for the pattern. In the decades since, brightly-colored camouflage has become more common, particularly in fashion – influenced, I’m sure, by Warhol’s paintings.