An enormous self-portrait of Andy Warhol, in which the artist appears phantasm-like, stares viewers in the face as they enter Vanitas, a new exhibition located on multiple floors of his namesake museum. Warhol is rendered simultaneously large and extremely fragile, the essence of vanity inflated to a staggering size it cannot sustain.
“He was quite a vulnerable guy, and that was part of what made him a great artist,” Patrick Moore, Vanitas curator and former Andy Warhol Museum executive director, tells Pittsburgh City Paper.
Vanitas draws from literal vanity and from the art historical tradition of vanitas, a popular genre of paintings, produced during the 16th and 17th centuries in the Netherlands, that served as “memento mori” images. Vanitas paintings employ books, flowers, rotten fruit, hourglasses, skulls, and other symbols to convey how close any of us is to death. (It bears noting that many of the works on display followed Warhol’s attempted assassination by Valerie Solanas in 1968.)
The Warhol organized Vanitas in collaboration with SCHUNCK, a contemporary art space in Heerlen, a post-industrial mining town in the central Netherlands. SCHUNCK and Moore initially connected over Andy Warhol: Revelation, a 2019-2020 exhibition that focused on Catholic motifs in Warhol’s work. The two parties remained in touch and produced Vanitas, Moore’s last show with the Warhol.
Fabian de Kloe, artistic director of SCHUNCK, notes that SCHUNCK often uses colored walls to accentuate the spaces they work in and that exhibition design is a paramount concern for them. The colored walls have a noticeable effect, reducing glare and making colors pop more vividly. In a space like The Warhol’s that has little to no natural light, the walls breathe life into the rooms.
This is particularly effective in the room showcasing Warhol’s Shadows paintings. These works are mesmerizing — some of the best I’ve seen from Warhol. de Kloe describes Shadows as “cosmological,” adding that that might seem “corny,” but it’s true. The paintings are at once gentle and visceral, with a vastness in them that’s hard to look away from.
Based on a photo Warhol took in his office, the artist had wanted to use diamond dust from a friend of his in New York’s Diamond District, but it didn’t achieve the glitter effect he wanted, so he used crushed glass instead.
“We thought, ‘Who are we to take that away from him?’ So we put that on the gallery cards anyway,” Moore says.
This small detail highlights one of the most interesting elements of Warhol’s work, that it resists sentimentality. Sure, it’s a better, neater story that he used diamond dust, but the reality is much more interesting and multifaceted. By making this small change on the gallery card, the Warhol shows it’s in on the joke with the artist it represents. Warhol always kept something for himself in the work, some secret that allows those who see it to project whatever they want onto the mystery.
This theme appears again in a screen test of Ann Buchanan. In it, Buchanan appears to be crying, but was actually tearing up because Warhol asked her to keep her eyes open. It would tug on the heartstrings more to imagine her so moved by Warhol’s vulnerability that she burst into tears, but it’s all part of the performance. That fact doesn’t make the footage any less intimate and moving.
“The line between Warhol as a person and Warhol as a work of art is thin,” Moore says.
de Kloe mentions that the film, specifically, stuck out to him as representative of Warhol’s interest in temporality and futility. “He always wanted to slow down time,” de Kloe tells City Paper. Think of Sweet, three hours of looking at his lover, or Empire, eight hours of footage where nothing happens besides the sun setting over the Empire State Building.
There are parts of Vanitas that elicit genuine emotion. The show constructs a real-life vanitas out of ephemera from Warhol’s Time Capsule archive — his electric toothbrush, acne cream, wig tape, and hand-written notes from his partner, John Gould. There’s something intimate and touching about these objects, especially given that part of Warhol’s appeal is that, by being so confessional and provocative in his work, he becomes unknowable.
Vanitas is organized into three themes: Vanitas, Temporality, and Mortality. The exhibition, which stretches over the museum’s second and fourth floors, showcases Warhol’s use of skull imagery in his work. “Some people find them really off-putting, but I had them in my office when I worked here,” Moore says. Warhol’s skulls, in this context, recall “All Is Vanity” by Charles Allan Gilbert, a double-image painting depicting a skull formed by a woman seated at her vanity.
The fourth floor features a series of vanitas paintings on loan from the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands, which Warhol visited in 1956. (Since Warhol saved all his ticket stubs, the curators at SCHUNCK were able to pinpoint the exact dates he was at the Rijksmuseum and see that the vanitas paintings were on view at the time he visited.) Vanitas could have gone further with this addition, perhaps spreading them out more or pairing them with more objects from Warhol’s personal effects.
Though Vanitas deals with the macabre, it avoids feeling depressing, and, in some ways, it’s the most vital Warhol’s halls have been in recent years. The showcased work also represents Warhol at his best, and how even his most morbid works attract attention — for example, the designer Calvin Klein shot ads in front of Warhol’s giant Skull painting.
“That’s what Warhol did. He took serious subjects and made them accessible and cool,” says Moore.
Andy Warhol: Vanitas. Continues through March 9, 2026. The Andy Warhol Museum. 117 Sandusky St., North Side. Included with regular admission. warhol.org
This article appears in Election Guide Oct. 8-14, 2025.
