In this late self-portrait from 1986, Andy Warhol appears as both artist and apparition. Wearing his signature platinum wig and dark sunglasses, he stares blankly through the lens of a Polaroid camera, his face washed in harsh flash. The background is minimal, the palette subdued. Taken just a year before his death, this photograph belongs to a group of carefully composed Polaroids that served as the basis for his final and most iconic series of self-portraits—works that have come to define Warhol’s last constructed image.

Warhol had used Polaroids extensively throughout the 1970s and 1980s to capture celebrities, friends, and strangers alike. These images functioned as both documentation and raw material for his silkscreen portraits. In this case, however, the subject is Warhol himself, and the effect is markedly different. The immediacy of the Polaroid enhances the tension between authenticity and performance—between the man and the mask he built over decades in the public eye.

What is striking about this image is its deliberate flatness. There is no attempt to convey emotion or vulnerability, and yet its impact is haunting. The wig appears unruly, almost electric; the black turtleneck erases the body, reducing Warhol to a head floating in darkness. The sunglasses deny the viewer access, turning the portrait into a surface of stylized detachment. But within that detachment lies the most profound self-disclosure.

This image also situates Warhol within the long tradition of self-portraiture in Western art. From Dürer and Rembrandt to Goya and Picasso, artists have returned to their own image in moments of reflection and mortality. Warhol’s Fright Wig series embraces this lineage but reframes it through the lens of Pop and postmodernism. Rather than revealing the self, he stages its absence—making the photograph both elegy and icon.

Today, Warhol’s Fright Wig Polaroids stand as some of the most enduring images of his career. They are a final, haunting expression of his lifelong interest in fame, identity, and surface—stripped of color, stripped of context, but saturated with meaning.

NOTES

Initialed 'T.J.H.' by Timothy J. Hunt of The Andy Warhol Foundation in pencil and 'Estate of Andy Warhol,' 'Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts' stamps on the verso. It also presents the inventory number of the Andy Warhol Foundation written in pencil.