Floor 4: Warhol East (exiting City Gallery)
Overview
Gallery Wayfinding
You are in the Andy Warhol Gallery. You are surrounded by some large silkscreen portraits of celebrity figures and faces, including Warhol himself.
You've entered from the front left corner of this long rectangular gallery, facing the short, far back wall. The gallery is partially split into two equal-size galleries by a wall extending into the middle of the gallery from the right wall. The second part of the gallery towards the front has white walls and five silkscreen prints. This gallery includes two Andy Warhol self-portraits displayed perpendicular to each other. One is toward the front of the left wall, and the other is on the left side of the front wall. Although they depict the same image, each uses a different visual treatment, and their close placement highlights these contrasts.
The second part of the gallery towards the back has pale lavender walls, five silkscreen prints, and an artist panel with a video about Warhol. To access the audio, use the handheld listening device attached to the panel.
The exit to the Cy Twombly Gallery is in the back right corner of the second gallery. The QR code is at the threshold on the right wall, marked with a perpendicular tactile floor strip.
Note to visitors: If this is the beginning of your journey on the 4th Floor, you might be starting halfway through the exhibition. To find the start of the exhibition, turn around and walk to your left down to the end of the City Gallery. The 4th Floor Tactile Map is on the wall across from the elevators.
Label
"If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it."
—Andy Warhol, 1966
Andy Warhol
Born 1928, Pittsburgh; died 1987, New York
Andy Warhol began his professional life as a successful advertising illustrator. After shifting to fine art in the early 1960s, he made the radical decision to adapt materials and strategies from the commercial realm: In 1962, screenprinting became his primary medium. This technique, which uses photographs to make printing plates, allowed Warhol—together with assistants in his studio, which he called The Factory—to readily appropriate images from the mass media. With their repetitive imagery and mechanical surfaces, Warhol's works are often perceived as cool and detached. Seen together, however, his depictions of celebrities, criminals, and national and everyday tragedies invite us to reflect on culture, consumption, death, and identity.
Related Media
Transcript
[This is a silent process video]
Objects
5 objects in the order you'll encounter them from this entrance. Select an object to view details.
Artwork Label Text
1986
Acrylic paint and silkscreen ink on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1998
Visual Description
A large, vertical work—about the size of a single-car garage door—in acrylic paint and silkscreen ink on linen combines a grayscale, photographic portrait of artist Joseph Beuys, a young white man, with an all-over camouflage pattern in teal green, tan, light gray, and brown.
Centered in the composition, the man's head and upper torso emerge beneath the printed pattern. He wears a dark, wide-brimmed hat with a rounded crown and a thick black hatband. His face is rendered in soft black-and-white tones with slightly blurred edges, showing a straight nose and a closed mouth. His eyes are open wide and looking right at us, and his cheekbones are intermittently masked by irregular camouflage patches, creating a partially hidden expression. The man's shoulders and jacket continue downward, increasingly obscured by dense camouflage shapes. The camouflage forms stretch edge to edge, layering over both the background and the figure so that the portrait appears to dissolve into the pattern.
The piece is set within a black wood frame.
Artwork Label Text
1983
Acrylic paint and silkscreen ink on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1998
Visual Description
A nearly-square painting on linen—one that is about the size of an average wall poster—uses acrylic paint and silkscreen ink to present a stark, black-and-white portrait of a man, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, with a triple-exposure effect.
Centered in the composition is the man's head and face. He is young, with pale, white skin and thick, dark, tousled hair that forms a dense mass across the top of the image. His face is repeated three times, with one primary face in the middle and two lighter, semi-transparent duplicates shifted to our left and to our right. The central face is the sharpest: dark full eyebrows frame wide, light-toned eyes; the nose and mouth are partially obscured by overlapping shadows and printed layers. The two flanking faces fade into the white background, their features—eyes, cheekbones, jawlines, and ears—are barely visible and washed out.
Below the faces, the figure appears to be wearing a dark jacket with wide lapels over a light shirt and tie. The thrice-repeated attire fills the lower half in heavy black shapes. Scattered white specks and streaks appear in the black areas, suggesting highlights on a shiny leather jacket. The background remains mostly white. The piece is set within a white wood frame.
Artwork Label Text
1979/1986
Acrylic paint and silkscreen ink on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1987
Warhol began making portraits of actress Marilyn Monroe shortly after her death in 1962 and returned to her image throughout the 1960s. Between 1979 and 1986, at the height of his own career, he revisited his most iconic subjects in his Reversal series, inverting the colors of his earlier paintings as a way to confront his own fame. Here, Monroe's face is captured in negative, cast in haunting black with bright colors accentuating her famed features. By repeating her image, Warhol explores the idea of celebrity as a media product for consumption.
Visual Description
A vertical linen work about the size of a large wall poster uses acrylic paint and silkscreen ink to present nine repeated, tightly cropped portraits of the actress and model Marilyn Monroe. They are arranged in a three-by-three grid.
Each head-and-neck image shows Monroe, a young woman with light skin, facing forward with her signature short, curled blonde hairstyle, arched brows, half-lidded eyes, and full lips. The portraits are rendered in stark black shadows so that facial features emerge as cutout-like islands of color, similar to a negative of a photograph. Across the grid, the color treatments shift: some of the faces are edged and lit with minty green, others with pale icy blue, others with vivid orange-red, and one with chalky white highlights, producing an alternation of cool and warm tones.
The background remains predominantly black, intensifying the neon-like accents and the graphic contrast of the silkscreened contours. Ink overlaps and slight misregistrations create doubled edges around hair and jawlines, with occasional vertical streaks and smears—especially near the lower middle portraits—adding another layer over the screen-printed shapes. The piece is set within two wood frames: the inner frame is a light brown wood, and the outer frame is thick white wood.
Artwork Label Text
1986
Acrylic paint and silkscreen ink on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1993
This painting and the nearby violet-toned Self-Portrait are part of a series of “fright wig” self-portraits that Warhol made several months before his death in February 1987. His seeming vulnerability in these works contrasts with the detached persona he usually presented to the world. Warhol appears gaunt, his hair standing on end and his seemingly disembodied head floating in a void. Here, the overlaid pattern of military camouflage—a motif the artist also explored in a series of abstract paintings from the same time—gestures toward Warhol’s masking of his private self behind a carefully constructed public identity.
Visual Description
A large, square work—higher than a tall adult, and slightly wider than their outstretched arms—made with acrylic paint and silkscreen ink on linen, presents a high-contrast portrait of artist Andy Warhol. He is depicted here as a gaunt, older man with light skin. The portrait is overlaid with a military-style camouflage pattern.
The upper half of the canvas is dominated by a large shock of whitish hair that is tousled and spiked: on the upper left, several long, pointed strands shoot diagonally upward, while the rest fans outward in clumps. Centered low in the composition, his face is rendered with shadows that show hollow cheeks, a straight nose, and slightly parted lips. His dark eyes look right at us, with dark eyes, dark eyebrows, and a neutral expression. His chin nearly touches the bottom of the canvas and his eyes are below the center line.
A camouflage pattern of flat, organic shapes in pale gray, medium gray, off-white, and black cover the man’s head, alternately revealing and obscuring its features. The eyes—sunk in deep shadows with dark irises and reflective highlights—look at us through gaps in the overlay, while the nose bridge and lips are intermittently covered by lighter patches. Subtle smoky gradients and soft photographic grain in the portrait contrast with the fine-edged, graphic blocks of paint and ink.
Artwork Label Text
1986
Acrylic paint and silkscreen ink on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1998
Visual Description
A large, square work—higher than a tall adult, and slightly wider than their outstretched arms—made with acrylic paint and silkscreen ink on linen presents a purple-and-black portrait of artist Andy Warhol. He is depicted here as a gaunt, older man with light skin. His head floats on a dark background with no visible neck or shoulders.
The upper half of the canvas is dominated by a large shock of whitish hair that is tousled and spiked: on the upper left, several long, pointed strands shoot diagonally upward, while the rest fans outward in clumps. Centered low in the composition, his face is rendered in pale lavender tones with sharp, high-contrast shadows that show hollow cheeks, a straight nose, and slightly parted lips. His dark eyes look right at us with a neutral expression. His chin nearly touches the bottom of the canvas and his eyes are below the center line. The background is a deep, black-violet field scattered with tiny white speckles and faint surface marks.