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

“If you want to know all about Andy Warhol,” said Andy Warhol in 1967, “just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, there I am. There's nothing behind it.”

With that, the world-famous Pop Artist threw down the gauntlet. Whether you’re an art expert or an ordinary joe, your curiosity is aroused. Critics are always on the hunt for the deeper meaning in an image; we can’t help it. And as the tabloids well know, few people can resist the opportunity of peeking behind the mask of famous celebrities.

Warhol was followed around by photographers, he made numerous television appearances, and his diaries were published in mind-numbing detail. Added to that, he made scores of self-portraits from the start of his fine-art career in 1963 until his premature death in 1987. You would think that with all this, it would be easy to form a clear picture of the man behind the public mask. You would be wrong.

With Warhol’s self-portraits gathered together for the first time ever, the Gallery of Modern Art’s exhibition is a unique opportunity to come face to face with the artist. If ever there was a chance to see what Warhol was like, this is it. And we do see what he was like – we just don’t see what he was.

Edinburgh is one of only three stops for this show, and it’s not to be missed. Eighty self-portraits have plenty of breathing space in the large ground floor of the gallery, accompanied by clear and insightful wall-panels whose design is suitably chic and glossy. The largest central space is a welcome chill-out room, papered from ceiling to floor in Warhol’s garish self-portrait wallpaper.

Warhol would have loved this exhibition; he liked to be the centre of attention. From the wallpaper, that much is clear. Although he designed it at the age of 50, he looks like a teen idol, and this room much like an obsessive teenager’s bedroom. Warhol understood that after death you can be any age you like, and with the exception of his final series, he felt no obligation to document the wrinkles of his later years.

Even in his earliest self-portraits, Warhol is playing games with us. Still an art student, the young Warhol shows himself picking his nose. The shaky drawing style is not the slick Warhol we’re all familiar with, and the subject is – while arresting – not pretty. Warhol draws attention to the very feature which he hates most, his nose. Nine years later, with cosmetic surgery, he would pick a new one.

During the 1950s, when he was in great demand for his ad designs, Warhol drew himself again. This time he completely covers his face with his hands, leaving only one ear exposed, along with his short dark hair. The irony is that few of us would recognise Warhol’s real hair; our collective memory tells us that the real Warhol wore a big blond wig.

The battle-lines are already drawn. In these two little images, Warhol has made it clear that the world has no special right to see into his soul. By 1963 he will have formed a conscious strategy to use his face as a logo, turning himself into a living icon on a par with Marilyn Monroe. Having achieved the same effect with a Campbell’s soup tin, Warhol knew that deep, soulful truths didn’t come into the equation. Instant recognition, ruthless repetition, and a whiff of glamour or notoriety – it didn’t matter which – were all he needed.

In his first full-scale self-portrait, Warhol adopts the role of shifty Hollywood sleuth, in trench coat and sunglasses. Adjusting his tie, the artist tilts his head so oddly that it looks almost disconnected from his shoulders. In his later self-portraits it will become entirely disconnected, floating untethered against a black background.

Rather than showing his face as an integral part of himself, Warhol seems to play around with its uses as a self-contained logo. The rest of his body never features in any of Warhol’s finished works, only appearing occasionally in polaroids. In these he shows off his scars after his near-fatal shooting in 1968, and the impression is of a martyred saint.

It’s important not to forget the importance of religious imagery in Warhol’s life and work. Brought up in the Byzantine Catholic church of Eastern Europe, Warhol was surrounded by religious icons of Christ and the saints. Practising the new pop religion of fame and fortune, Warhol could still turn to the direct, frontal simplicity of the old Catholic icons.

Their influence is most obvious in two late self-portraits, printed in negative on gold and silver canvasses. Warhol’s disembodied head looks like a death-mask, his hair in a vertical clump as if hanging from the fist of a triumphant executioner. If there weren’t two, side by side, the image would look like a precious relic; by making two, Warhol immediately exposes the lie.

Warhol finds so many ways of hiding behind his own image. If it’s not his hands, it’s his sunglasses, or his costume. He dresses up as a woman, he blots out his face with camouflage patterns and he allows the shadows, frequently, to consume his outline. In a whole series of 1967 screenprints, a big shadow dominates the composition, blotting out more than half of Warhol’s face, and leaving the rest as a few indistinct blobs of colour.

When Warhol arrived in New York, it was a world where artists poured their deepest, darkest souls onto canvasses, dripping and whirling in frenzies of self-expression. Every brushstroke was a human gesture, containing a piece of the artist’s physical emotion. If there’s dripping and whirling in Warhol’s art, there’s no point reading emotion into it. It’s more likely to have been a stray squeegee or a distracted assistant.

And that’s the case in these 1967 prints. The huge areas of shadow are full of interesting textures, colours reacting with each other and creating random patterns. Instinctively, you want to ascribe these textures to Warhol, in person, as a piece of Abstract Expressionism. But in fact, they are mechanical, created by the screenprinting process and merely endorsed by the artist. Instead of communicating something personal, these patterns act as yet another barrier between Warhol and the world.

The more Warhol shows his face to us, the more he succeeds in hiding behind it. There is a deep confusion about the public and the private, and you wonder whether the private Warhol survived this onslaught at all. Perhaps, in the end, he began to believe his own public image and the shadow became the man.

It all feels a bit familiar, as the trial of Michael Jackson gets under way. There seems to be a land between reality and fiction, between private and public, where some people get lost. Warhol doesn’t tell us much about himself, but in his self-portraits, he shows us that land. And there really does seem to be nothing beneath the surface.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 20.02.05