Only the Shadow Knows: Andy Warhol's Art of Self-Invention and the Legacy of Man Ray

Reframing Andy Warhol: Constructing American Myths, Heroes, and Cultural Icons, 1998

Wendy A Grossman

As an American artist who transcended his ethnic immigrant roots, Man Ray blazed a trail that Andy Warhol would follow in the next generation. Obsessed with the public perception of his work and his legacy, Man Ray innovatively employed self-portraiture as key to the construction of his persona just as would Warhol decades later. In the great distance between their ethnic roots and the cosmopolitan figures they were to become, the range of self-portraits both artists created played a fundamental role in this transformation. Although Man Ray’s self-portraits are intricately related to the construction of modernism and Warhol’s work in the same vein relates to the process of its deconstruction, their self-portrayals are bound by the same obsessive desire to control and fabricate their public image. As the sons of Eastern European immigrants, neither ever fully shed the sense of himself as outsider, ultimately adopting a notion of marginalized observer as intrinsic to his artistic persona. Whether in the avant-garde Parisian circles between the World Wars or in the celebrity spotlight of the sixties Pop scene, both artists straddled the border between participants and observers in their lives and their art.

Page Numbers: 18-26

Publication Date: 1998

Publication Name: Reframing Andy Warhol: Constructing American Myths, Heroes, and Cultural Icons