Perhaps the most harrowing and enigmatic of Warhol's self-portraits were his last, done in 1986. In these monumental images the artist presented himself as a macabre, disembodied head floating in a black void and staring hypnotically at the viewer, hair rising off his head like a snaky-haired Medusa. As in so much of Warhol's art, the overriding message seems obscured by the very directness of the image. Does the artist play the shaman here -- the magician/jester who, with his own ravaged face, holds the mirror of folly up to ours? Is he the artist as sphinx, his art a riddle that both reveals and conceals the truth? Is this merely theatrical reportage -- a frank, frontal self-assessment at age fifty-eight? Or is this the face of death itself?

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