Warhol, Self-Portrait (1986)

Coming up for auction tomorrow night at Sotheby's is a large-scale late self-portrait by Andy Warhol estimated to sell between $10,000,000 - 15,000,000. I'm showing the yellow painting that is installed at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburg - the one for sale tomorrow is purple. He executed several series of self-portraits over his career, and in each series revealed a little more of himself. In this last series, of which there are 5 finished paintings, he shows us his entire face in all of its stark reality and brutal honesty. The frontality, the sheer size of the canvas, and the confrontational posturing is hard to escape. Unlike the Abstract Expressionists that came before him (Rothko, Pollock, de Kooning, Kline) Warhol leaves us little room for spiritual interpretation that comes from visually exploring the various permutations and movements of paint and composition. Instead, we are presented with a bold and direct image for our consumption. It is this element - consumption - that defined Warhol's career and aesthetic, which in turn became the driving force in his role as the greatest artist of the 1960s Pop Art movement. Consumption, consumerism, commercialism, mechanical reproduction merging with high art -- all of these qualities were the underpinnings of Warhol's work and the movement in general.

It will be interesting to see the hammer price of this painting, as it's one of his most important pieces and predated his untimely death by just a year. Here is a private video screening of the work, which gives us a nice sense of its enormous scale and visual power it must have for the viewer.