Andy Warhol: Self-Portraits
February 12 – May 2; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Right at the front door of Edinburgh’s Gallery of Modern Art, you can smell the fresh paint. The whole ground floor is whiter than white, in keen anticipation of the major Andy Warhol show which opens on Saturday. Scattered around the corridor are huge wooden packing crates labelled “Empty”; their contents are already in the well-guarded galleries, propped carefully in position on scraps of carpet underlay. In the midst of painting and carpeting my new house, I’m quite at home with these sights and smells, but I'm not so used to what I see next.

A team of white-gloved men holds up a ghostly golden double-image of Andy Warhol, two emaciated self-portraits superimposed, four sets of staring eyes slightly averted. The curator, Keith Hartley, stares back intently. After a long silence he says “one inch to the right”. The men edge the picture along the wall so subtly that the difference is barely perceptible. Hartley contemplates the image for another heavily silent moment. “Yes, that’s it,” he finally says, and relaxes while the hanging team busy themselves with a drill.

Hartley, with his shock of silver-blond hair and thick-rimmed glasses, looks just right among dozens of iconic images of Andy Warhol. The curator has spent the last three years collaborating with his counterparts in Germany and Switzerland to stage this major show. It is, in fact, the world’s first show devoted to Andy Warhol self-portraits, and Hartley can barely believe it.

“Some of the big retrospectives have included self-portraits,” he explains, “but they’ve been lost among the other works. It is amazing really. Everyone recognises Warhol and part of that is because he did such iconic images of himself.” These images have been begged and borrowed from collections around the world, no easy task when a good Warhol can ensure a steady stream of visitors to its own institution.

The show’s earliest picture might not look much like a Warhol, but the cheekiness is there in spades. In a shaky drawing, the young Warhol picks his nose. “Already he’s very wilful, striking a pose,” comments Hartley, bending down to examine the small work, not yet hung. “It’s in a deliberately naïve style, which looks forward to this rather ‘dumb’ way in which he later behaved in interviews.”

Warhol was to be an interviewer’s nightmare, sometimes uttering no more than ‘yes’ and ‘no’ throughout entire discussions. He cultivated a shallow image, refusing to admit to hidden depths or profundities of any sort. What you see is what you get, he would say; it’s all surface.

“You tend to think of self-portraiture in a rather romantic way as a window on the soul,” says Hartley, “but artists have always used self-portraits as a way of play-acting… I think Warhol already knew that he wasn’t going to do much soul-searching in his work.”

The artist soon found his vocation. Having raised images of stars like Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor to cult status, he chose do the same for himself. His life was to become a conscious exercise in branding, and that meant concentrating on surface, not substance.

“He had an uncanny ability to go for just the right image,” says Hartley, “and then use just the right colours and the right way of simplifying it”. Even when Warhol used hasty snaps churned out of a photo-booth, he managed to make them look iconic.

Enlarged and screen-printed in his trademark garish colours, Warhol’s face is on every gallery wall, along with thick glasses and straw-blond wig. He glares, he ponders, he tilts his head; he dresses up as detective, woman, hanged man. He emerges from black shadows and is obliterated by them. He hides behind his hands, behind his sunglasses, behind his own iconic image.

The more Warhol shows his face, the more he seems to shelter behind it. But, at the same time you get the uneasy feeling that what you see really is what you get; that there is no private Warhol underneath. He performed his chosen role so effectively that it very possibly became a reality. The wigs might have been artificial, but the nose job was real.

Warhol “wasn’t as good-looking as he would have liked to have been”, and Hartley has fun making me guess the artist’s age in various images. I’m mostly about 30 years off the mark. “He’s simply taken out all the signs of ageing,” chuckles the curator, “and made himself look like a mop-haired 21-year old.”

Despite all his public foppery, Warhol did have an intensely private side. “Most people would never realise,” says Hartley, “that towards the end of his life he went to church every day. He was a devout Catholic.” When the end of his life did come, it was not the way anyone expected. Having recovered from a gun-shot wound in 1968, Warhol should have gone out with a bang. Instead, he died unexpectedly in 1987 after a routine gall-bladder operation.

In the manner of all immortal stars, Warhol’s death hasn’t prevented him from producing artwork. The real wow-factor of this exhibition is going to be the wallpaper, printed to order in Pittsburg. Warhol’s face, repeated hundreds of times, will line the biggest room in the gallery.

I ask the curator if there will be any off-cuts going spare. Unfortunately, Hartley has promised to destroy every scrap after the exhibition. “Although it’s done posthumously,” he explains, “the screen for making it is still made by Warhol, so any off-cuts are in fact genuine Warhols.”

Pity – it would have looked nice in my new living room.

Warhol’s self-conscious path to pop immortality might offer clues to Michael Jackson’s deeply confused state. While Warhol chose to shape his fame from scratch, Jackson never got the chance to separate his public mask from his childhood self. He seeks eternal youth in Neverland, and in the plastic surgery. He is a product of his fans’ imagination, a melting shadow.

But Jackson clearly had his private pursuits, and so did Warhol.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 06.02.05