Staring into the abyss

Andy Warhol Portraits

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, until May 2

HE’S back, and this time it’s personal. Eighteen years after his death, the name Andy Warhol still sends the media into a feeding frenzy. Cue the master’s old associates, minds addled by drugs and time, serving up bite-sized memories to insatiable fans. Cue TV companies filming pundits standing in front of that weel kent face, adding their words to the millions already written on the man who "changed the way we look at art". And still we want to know more; to get closer; to peer inside his soul.

But be careful to read the title of this exhibition: ‘self-portraits’. This is in fact the first ever show devoted entirely to Warhol’s own images of himself. Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise us, for if his art is about anything, it is about Andy Warhol. He is the ultimate artist-icon. Yet if the skull-face, mad wig and piercing eyes are so familiar, they are not the reason for his popularity.

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People love Warhol not for what he did to himself, but what he did to Marilyn, Ali, Elvis, Coke and Campbell’s Soup. We love him for his Pop. But this show is about something far darker. It is about a long day’s journey into night; a voyage through one man’s self-obsession, and it is nothing less than bizarre. Think about it. What other artist has depicted himself so many times? Surely the only face to feature in art with quite such frequency must be that of Christ?

A self-portrait is purportedly as honest as an artist gets. It might be intended as advertising or dressed up as image-making. But, even unintentionally, it ends up telling us what the painter thinks of himself. As much is true here. But whereas with a single image of Rembrandt or Van Gogh we might feel a sense of communion or sympathy, with Warhol we simply find ourselves staring into the void. Warhol’s blank gaze seems to epitomise his famous wish that the artist should be a machine, but it also betrays a subliminal belief in immortality.

The show, hung in chronological order, kicks off with some nice early drawings, including what must be the only self-portrait of an artist picking his nose. The earliest large paintings of 1963/4 show Warhol in shades and mac, resembling Michael Caine’s spy, Harry Palmer. This is revealing. For as the show progresses you become increasingly more aware that Warhol, like Palmer, is a pathological liar.

While this does not make him any less of an artist, it is the key to understanding what he was doing. From changed name to peroxide wig, Warhol was forever in disguise. So sure of himself, yet so insecure, doing anything he could not to give himself away. He’s a ham actor wearing caricature expressions: petulance, fury, arrogance, dismay. But behind all the masks, even camouflaged, he cannot hide from the truth.

Hung in the corridor, the early works and the original photo-booth snapshots on which they were based reveal much about Warhol’s working method and are testimony to his essential genius to recontextualise the transient into the monumental.

We follow his troubled persona through the ’60s. He appears starkly simple in 1964, staring towards, but not at, the viewer, his gaze fixed on a point just above your head. By 1966, he is cast enigmatically in half light, half shadow, fuelling his own mystery. At one point in 1967 you imagine the frenzy of creative excitement as he manages almost to vaporise himself in a red negative. This is the man who said he was "obsessed with the idea of looking in the mirror and seeing no one, nothing". And so we leave him in 1967, looking impossibly youthful.

There is a yawning 10-year gap between this image and the next, during which time Warhol stopped painting himself. When he started again he looked very different. The reason was simple. In June 1968 Warhol was shot. He almost died. His faith in his own immortality shattered, he began to produce images of crashes, suicides, death. When he began to portray himself again, he was unable to take himself seriously. We see him with a skull. Not there for contemplation but as a fashion accessory - it sits on his shoulder, on his head.

These telling images would have made more sense had the show included Warhol’s late-’70s still-lifes of skulls in which he takes on the 17th-century cult of the memento mori, an intimation of impending oblivion. Strictly speaking these are not ‘self-portraits’ but the transubstantive idea is implicit. Even without the skulls though, you sense Warhol’s growing desperation. His terror of being alone. The most powerful works in the show are those in which he overlays his image with two or three more of himself in different poses. Perhaps, too, this is symbolic of a psychological disruption as Warhol the man attempts to reclaim himself from Warhol the legend.

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Tension is certainly evident in the engagement with the physical that permeates the later works, their thick overlay of pigment testifying to artistic intervention in an apparently un-Warholian way. Here, at last, in the terrifying disembodied heads crowned with exploding hair, Warhol seems to see his own nemesis.

But by the time you reach these horrors you might just have had enough. Looking at 85 portraits of Warhol is somewhat different to seeing 100 of Monet’s series paintings. The feeling, more of claustrophobia than monotony, is emphasised by the central gallery which contains nothing save four walls literally wallpapered with Andy’s face in yet another deliberate subversion of an artistic genre.

But don’t give up. Keep going. For as an exhibition this is unrepeatable, with a multi-layered ironic subtext that the artist would have relished. And only here will you really comprehend what a behemoth Warhol has become. And realise that, while others may have their 15 minutes of fame, Warhol is here to stay.

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