Andy Warhol’s very first self-portrait is being auctioned off by Sotheby’s on June 28 and the estimated price for the portrait has been pegged at about $8 million (£7m). The portrait in acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas is from the year 1963-64 when Warhol was 35. In the latter part of the twentieth-century, Andy Warhol joined the ranks of Rembrandt van Rijn, Vincent van Gogh, and Pablo Picasso to take his place amongst the most important and influential self-portraitists in the history of art. Throughout his career, he turned to his own visage to create works such as the present painting, filled with immediacy, vivacity, and sleek conceptual cool. This portrait on auction is one of the first ten self-portraits that Warhol ever created. Self-Portrait comes from a concise series of nine similarly titled works, each made in the same scale using silkscreen prints enlarged from the same shred of photographic source material.
