Warhol’s 1986 Self-Portraits

Warhol’s 1986 Self-Portraits occupied an uneasy space between personal image, gallery judgment, and popular circulation. In the diary, the works are first welcomed by Anthony d’Offay, then criticized by him; Keith Haring wanted to put them on T-shirts, while d’Offay’s choices for a London show left Warhol feeling that the displayed pictures were not the ones he had chosen.

Image and Portrait Practice

The diary does not detail how Warhol made these particular self-portraits, but his broader portrait process shows how carefully he constructed images. For portraits, he typically took about sixty Polaroids with a Polaroid Big Shot, selected four for screen-printing tests, then chose and cropped one image. He might alter the image to make a subject appear more attractive before enlarging it to a forty-inch acetate and turning it into a silkscreen. The resulting portrait was not simply a photographic likeness: the alignment of the screened image with painted color beneath it produced the characteristic shifting effect of his portraits.

That method makes the series’ appearance with Warhol’s hair raised, which d’Offay disliked, especially notable. His objection was not merely to a portrait of Warhol, but to a particular presentation of Warhol’s recognizable image. The diary identifies the hair as resembling Jean-Michel Basquiat’s, making the self-portraits’ visual styling part of the disagreement.

Changing Reactions and Gallery Judgment

On May 5, 1986, Warhol recorded that d’Offay had decided he loved the Self-Portraits. The change in response was striking: a little over two weeks later, d’Offay flew in from London and told Warhol that he did not like them. Warhol described the gallery owner as acting like an art director, and noted that Rupert Smith had been working hard on the pictures. The works thus appear not as a settled success but as objects whose standing could shift with the judgments of people involved in exhibiting them.

The tension extended to the larger selection of pictures for the show. Warhol described entering a room filled with photographs of himself that he considered poor, and insisted that they were not the ones he had picked. In his account, d’Offay had directed the exhibition’s choices, including preferring smaller camouflage works to the large ones Warhol favored. Warhol also recalled that he had sometimes made a different picture from the one d’Offay requested, assuming the gallery owner would not remember the specific choice. The episode reveals a practical divide between the artist’s preferences and the curator-like authority d’Offay exercised over the presentation.

Reproduction and Circulation

The Self-Portraits were also considered for circulation beyond the gallery. When Keith Haring saw them and wanted to use them on T-shirts for The Pop Shop, Warhol agreed. He thought about two hundred shirts had already been made and concluded that the group would probably have to buy them all back. The brief entry leaves the outcome uncertain, but records the potential cost of moving the images into merchandise as well as Warhol’s consent to their use.

The works therefore passed through several forms of appraisal: they were made and handled in the studio, assessed by a London gallery owner, selected for exhibition, and considered for reproduction on retail clothing. Their meaning in the diary comes partly from that movement. The self-image was at once a subject Warhol could shape, an image others could judge, and a design that might circulate under someone else’s commercial plans.

Significance

The diary presents the Self-Portraits through disagreements rather than through a formal account of their appearance or creation. D’Offay’s reversal, his control over the exhibition selection, Rupert Smith’s labor, and Haring’s proposed T-shirts show that the series existed within a network of production and mediation. Warhol’s image was not simply self-authored: its public form depended on choices about styling, selection, display, and reproduction.