Analysis
Andy Warhol made Self-portrait a few months before his death, which was in February 1987.
It uses a Polaroid photograph of him, with the material of acrylic polymer paint and silk screen printing to produce a camouflage pattern over the face surrounded by black.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes the image: "Warhol appears as a haunting, disembodied mask. His head floats in a dark black void and his face and hair are ghostly pale, covered in a militaristic camouflage pattern of green, gray, and black."
There is a contrast between the impersonality of the camouflage pattern, which hints at danger, and the personality of the portrait tradition, where there is direct contact with the viewer, although in this case with a protective illusory covering. The ambiguous uses of camouflage—drawing attention when a fashionable look and doing the opposite in military use—fascinated Warhol.
A version in the Philadelphia Museum of Art uses pink and magenta on the same black background. Another version similar to the one kept at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is part of the National Gallery of Victoria's modern art collection.
Read more about this topic: Camouflage Self-Portrait
Famous quotes containing the word analysis:
“... the big courageous acts of life are those one never hears of and only suspects from having been through like experience. It takes real courage to do battle in the unspectacular task. We always listen for the applause of our co-workers. He is courageous who plods on, unlettered and unknown.... In the last analysis it is this courage, developing between man and his limitations, that brings success.”
—Alice Foote MacDougall (18671945)
“Whatever else American thinkers do, they psychologize, often brilliantly. The trouble is that psychology only takes us so far. The new interest in families has its merits, but it will have done us all a disservice if it turns us away from public issues to private matters. A vision of things that has no room for the inner life is bankrupt, but a psychology without social analysis or politics is both powerless and very lonely.”
—Joseph Featherstone (20th century)
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)