Andy Warhol Skull Paintings: The 1976 Skulls, What They Mean and Where to See Them

The image began as a studio still life. Ronnie Cutrone set a human skull on a table at the Factory and photographed it while changing the light, so that it threw dramatic shadows across the tabletop (National Galleries of Scotland). That lighting is why the skull looks so theatrical in every version that followed.

Warhol then painted the canvas with flat grounds of acrylic or synthetic polymer paint and screen-printed the photograph over them. Silkscreen is a printing method that pushes ink through a fine mesh screen, so the same photographic image can be laid down again and again. Museum and auction descriptions record red, yellow, blue, purple, green and black among the contrasting color fields across the series. A skull floating on a sunny yellow ground looks almost cheerful.

People often speak of "the" Warhol skull, but the one photograph turns up in quite a few works, and they are not all the same size or kind.

The National Galleries of Scotland, which shares the work with Tate (accession AR00609), records a *Skulls* of 1976 made of six canvases, each 38.30 by 48.30 cm, hung in a grid three rows high and two across. At the other end of the scale, Christie's records a single *Skull* painted in 1976 that measures 72 by 80 inches, with a provenance through The Andy Warhol Museum and the Dia Art Foundation. It was exhibited at Galerie Heiner Friedrich in Cologne in November and December 1977 (Christie's).

The prints come next. The portfolio *Skulls*, also 1976, is a set of four color screenprints, each about 30 by 40 inches (76.2 by 101.6 cm). It is catalogued as Feldman and Schellmann II.157 to 160, printed on Strathmore Bristol paper and published by Andy Warhol Enterprises, Inc., in an edition of 50 plus 10 artist's proofs (Phillips). If you saw a bright Warhol skull on a sheet of paper rather than canvas, this portfolio is the likely family it belongs to.

The skull kept going after 1976. MoMA holds *Untitled (Skull)*, 1976, a drawing in pencil on paper (MoMA). SFMOMA holds a smaller *Skull* of 1977, 15 by 19 inches (SFMOMA). In 1978 Warhol put a skull into his *Self-Portrait with Skull*, now at The Andy Warhol Museum (The Andy Warhol Museum). His mid-1970s skull photographs were also preserved through the Andy Warhol Foundation's Photographic Legacy Project and given to university and museum collections.

The plainest meaning is the oldest one. A skull on its own is a memento mori, an image of mortality with a long Western history, and the National Galleries of Scotland points to the tension Warhol builds between bright, cheerful color and the skull's association with death.

Ronnie Cutrone, who took the photograph, put it more simply. Painting a skull, he said, was "like doing the portrait of everybody in the world" (Christie's). An anonymous skull, in other words, stands in for every sitter at once.

The curator Arthur K. Wheelock compared Warhol's skull with the skulls of Dutch still-life painting, which usually sit among books, glassware and other luxury objects. Warhol's skull has nothing around it, and Wheelock called it a stark confrontation with "the inevitability and mystery of death." The older tradition he had in mind is the subject of our story on vanitas paintings.

Warhol also wrote about death. In *The Philosophy of Andy Warhol* he put it this way: "I don't believe in it, because you're not around to know that it's happened." It is a dry line, and it sits oddly well beside a skull painted in yellow.

On June 3, 1968, in New York, Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol, and he was critically injured. He survived.

The National Galleries of Scotland reports that the art historians Hal Foster and Vincent Fremont linked Warhol's skull motif to that experience, while noting that the connection is not proven as Warhol's own intention. It is a reasonable reading of a man who came close to death painting a skull eight years later, and it is best held as exactly that: a reading by historians.

The best-known homes for Warhol's skulls are museums, though not all of them keep a skull on the wall at any given time.

The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh holds a *Skull* of 1976, accession 2002.4.24, along with the 1978 *Self-Portrait with Skull* (The Andy Warhol Museum). The six-canvas *Skulls* shared by Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland is listed as in storage. Museum Brandhorst in Munich has a 1976 *Skull* in collage and screenprint, inventory UAB 549, not currently displayed (Museum Brandhorst). SFMOMA's 1977 *Skull* and MoMA's 1976 pencil drawing are both listed as not currently on view.

Display changes with rehangs and loans, so check the museum's own collection page before you travel. If you do find one on view at The Warhol Museum, its galleries allow private, noncommercial photography.

The prices most people meet are for the four-print portfolio, and Phillips publishes them. A complete *Skulls* set sold for £95,250 at Phillips in 2018 (Phillips), for £69,850 on June 5 and 6, 2025 (Phillips), and for £96,750 on June 4, 2026 (Phillips).

Those are results for the complete print set, not for the paintings, and they move up and down from sale to sale. The large canvases are a different market altogether. For the price of a particular painting, ask the auction house that sold it.

Warhol, Basquiat and Hirst all made famous skulls, and putting them side by side shows how differently it can be used.

Warhol's is a mechanically repeated, theatrically lit still life: one anonymous skull turned into a Pop image through silkscreen, repetition and intense color. Jean-Michel Basquiat's skull-like heads, especially his *Untitled* of 1982, are made with acrylic, spray paint and oilstick, full of gestural marks, words and anatomy, with references to Black culture, street life and power (Seattle Art Museum). That 1982 painting is a different work from Basquiat's 1981 *Untitled* at The Broad, and both are in our story on Basquiat's skulls.

The two men knew each other well. Basquiat and Warhol became close collaborators in New York in the 1980s and made more than 100 paintings together (The Andy Warhol Museum).

Damien Hirst's *For the Love of God*, 2007, takes the skull somewhere else again, covering it in platinum and diamonds and pointing it toward luxury, spectacle and the value system of the art market. Its full story is in Hirst's diamond skull. Put simply, Warhol's skull is about repetition and mass imagery, Basquiat's about identity and social pressure, and Hirst's about luxury and price.

Short answers to the questions that come up most.

Warhol's skull is the newest of a very old line. For the skull Holbein hid in a portrait in 1533, read about The Ambassadors skull, and for a painter who kept skulls in his studio near the end of his life, Cézanne's skull paintings. The wider tour is in famous skull art, the idea behind it all in what memento mori means, and the many other meanings of the image in skull symbolism.

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