SFMOMA, Part 31: Floor 2, 1900 to Now. Self-Portrait (Andy Warhol, 1967).
The Self-Portrait of 1967 is 72⅛ inches square — just over six feet each way — and it is almost entirely one color: a hot, flat, cadmium red, with Warhol's face silkscreened in black over it like a stamp. The image is cropped tight, head and shoulders, the hair a pale mass at the top, the eyes dark holes, the mouth a thin line. It looks like a mugshot printed on a warning sign. It looks like the most famous face in the art world trying to disappear into its own logo.
Up close, the red is not flat at all. It is acrylic paint, hand-applied, and you can see the working — the slight variations, the places where the brush dragged, the human unevenness under the mechanical image. The silkscreen of the face is crisp by comparison, and the contrast is the whole painting: the handmade ground versus the machine-made face, the artist's hand versus the artist's image, six feet of red insisting that both things are true. From across the gallery it reads as a single red square with a face in it. From six inches it reads as labor. Warhol, who built a career on erasing the difference between those two readings, left the difference visible here. That is interesting. That is the kind of interesting that keeps you standing in front of it longer than you planned.
Self-Portrait (1967) is acrylic paint and silkscreen ink on linen, 72⅛ × 72⅛ inches — 183.1 × 183.1 cm. SFMOMA acquired it in 1992 as the gift of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, the Bay Area collectors whose Pop holdings seeded the museum's collection. It is currently on view on Floor 2 as part of 1900 to Now: SFMOMA's Collection — in the same galleries as the Triple Elvis on Floor 4, which means you can see Warhol aiming a gun at you and Warhol staring at you in the same visit. Plan accordingly.
The easy reading is vanity: the most photographed artist of the century paints himself, again, because he loves looking at himself. It is not wrong — Warhol did love his image, and he managed it the way a corporation manages a trademark — but it is thin. The 1967 self-portraits are not celebrations. They are inventory. Warhol returned to his own face roughly every five years for the rest of his life, the way a company refreshes a logo, and each series records the state of the brand: 1964 (young, blue, glamorous), 1967 (red, flat, watchful), 1978 (shadowed), 1986 (the fright-wig portraits, made the year before he died). The 1967 version is the coldest of the early ones. The red does not flatter. It warns.
And the date matters more than the art history usually admits. This painting was made in 1967. On June 3, 1968 — less than a year after this red face was printed — Valerie Solanas walked into the Factory and shot Warhol. He was clinically dead for a time; the surgeons opened his chest and massaged his heart. He lived, scarred, in constant pain, wearing a surgical corset for the rest of his life. Look at the red self-portrait with that date in mind and it stops being a brand exercise. It looks like a premonition. It looks like a man painting his own target.
1963–1967: The face becomes a product
Warhol's first self-portraits were made in 1963–64, and they belong to the celebrity-portrait moment — the same silkscreen machinery as the Marilyns and the Lizs, turned on the artist himself. The famous one from 1964 is blue, glamorous, the young Warhol posing like his own subjects. It is a brilliant move and a slightly desperate one: the artist declaring himself a star in the same visual language he used for actual stars, as if to say the category includes him.
By 1966–67, the language had changed. Warhol was deep in film — the Screen Tests, the long durational movies, hundreds of hours of footage of people sitting still and being looked at — and the films changed how he saw faces. The mid-sixties portraits get more restrained, more monochrome, more about the act of looking than the glamour of the sitter. The red self-portraits come out of this moment: single images, not multiples; flat fields of color; the face reduced to its essentials. The source was a photo-booth strip, the cheapest and most democratic portrait format available. Warhol took the four-frame strip and blew one frame up to six feet. The most casual image technology of the century, scaled to monument.
The red itself is worth sitting with. Warhol's 1967 self-portraits exist in several colors, but the red is the one SFMOMA has, and it is the right one for the argument. Red is the color of the Self-Portrait as warning: stop, danger, do not cross. It is also, in the Catholic visual vocabulary Warhol grew up with in Pittsburgh — the Byzantine icons in his mother's church, the gold and red of the Carpatho-Rusyn tradition — the color of martyrdom. I am not saying Warhol intended the religious reading. I am saying he grew up inside it, and the red face on the six-foot square has the frontality of an icon whether he wanted it to or not. The stare does not invite you in. It holds you where you are.
1968: The shooting
June 3, 1968. Valerie Solanas, a writer who had appeared in Warhol's films and whose play he had declined to produce, shot Warhol and the art critic Mario Amaya at the Factory. Amaya survived with minor wounds. Warhol's injuries were catastrophic: the bullet tore through his lungs, spleen, stomach, liver, and esophagus. He was pronounced dead and revived on the operating table. The physical damage never healed — chronic pain, the corset, the fear — and the psychological damage reorganized everything. The open, chaotic Factory of the sixties closed. The businesslike Factory of the seventies opened. Warhol the participant became Warhol the survivor.
I keep the shooting in this piece because the 1967 self-portrait cannot be seen cleanly after it, and should not be. The red face, made a year before the bullets, is the last self-image of the pre-shooting Warhol — the one who still believed, or performed belief, that the Factory was a party and not a target. After June 1968, every Warhol self-portrait is a survivor's portrait, and the red ones read retroactively as the before picture. The stare in the 1967 canvas is watchful. After the shooting, you understand what it was watching for.
This is not biography-as-gossip. It is the specific way Warhol's self-portraits function: they are dated instruments, and the dates do work. The 1964 blue self-portrait is the artist becoming a star. The 1967 red is the star sensing the danger. The 1978 is the survivor. The 1986 fright-wig is the ghost. Nobody else in 20th-century art made their own face into this precise a timeline. Rembrandt did it in paint, year by year, but Rembrandt was recording a life. Warhol was managing an asset, and the asset kept almost dying.
The Andersons and the Bay Area Pop story
The Andersons — Harry W. and Mary Margaret — are the reason this painting is in San Francisco, and their story is the Bay Area's quiet claim on Pop. Starting in the 1960s, the couple assembled one of the great private collections of postwar American art, with a particular strength in Pop: Warhol, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Rosenquist, the whole movement's first rank. In 1992 they gave SFMOMA thirty works — this Self-Portrait among them — and later gave 121 works to Stanford, where the Anderson Collection opened in 2014. The Bay Area, which the New York story treats as Pop's distant province, actually holds one of the deepest Pop collections in the world, assembled by two people who just kept buying what they liked.
Hang the 1967 Self-Portrait in that context and it becomes a different painting: not the isolated genius staring out of the red, but one node in a network of Pop holdings that lets you see the movement whole. SFMOMA can show you Warhol's 1963 Elvis aiming at you on Floor 4 and Warhol's 1967 face watching you on Floor 2, and between them is the entire arc — the star-maker, the star, the gun, the stare. That is a curatorial argument you cannot make in New York, because New York scattered its Warhols. San Francisco kept them together. The Andersons saw to that.
The stare
Back to Floor 2, then, and the six feet of red. What stays with me is not the fame or the shooting or the brand management. It is the specific quality of the stare. Warhol's face in the 1967 portrait is not expressive — there is no emotion to read, no psychology on offer. It is a face that has been processed into an image and is now processing you back. The photo-booth source means the original moment was casual, unposed, a machine's record. The six-foot red square means the casual moment has been turned into a monument. Between those two facts is the whole Warhol career: the everyday, scaled up until it becomes myth, without ever stopping being everyday.
He looks at you the way his camera looked at everyone in the Screen Tests: without blinking, without judging, without looking away. It is the least flattering and most honest portrait convention ever invented. Stand in front of it long enough and the red stops being a color and starts being a condition — the condition of being seen by someone who sees everything and says nothing. That was Warhol's gift and his wound. The painting is both, six feet square, in red. 🌁
Timeline — Andy Warhol
1928 — born August 6, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
1963–64 — first self-portraits; the blue 1964 version; the celebrity-portrait machinery turned inward
1966–67 — the red self-portrait series; acrylic and silkscreen on linen; the photo-booth source, the monochrome turn, the film years
1967 — paints the Self-Portrait now at SFMOMA, 72⅛ × 72⅛ in.
June 3, 1968 — shot by Valerie Solanas at the Factory; pronounced dead, revived; the red portrait becomes the before picture
1978 — the shadow self-portraits; 1986 — the fright-wig self-portraits, the year before his death
1987 — dies February 22, New York, age 58
1992 — the Andersons give the 1967 Self-Portrait to SFMOMA
Today — on view, Floor 2, 1900 to Now: SFMOMA's Collection, 151 Third Street. He is still staring.