The Shadow 267 by Andy Warhol presents a stark double image split across the surface of the print. On the right, Warhol’s face appears in deep red tones, cropped tightly in profile with parted lips and a distant gaze. To the left, his dark silhouette expands outward, flattened into a dense gray shadow that dominates most of the composition. A sharp vertical divide separates face and shadow, creating a tense visual contrast between presence and absence, color and void.
The Shadow 267 within the Myths Portfolio
The Shadow 267 is one of ten screenprints from Warhol’s 1981 Myths portfolio. While Warhol is widely known for portraits of figures such as Marilyn Monroe and Jacqueline Kennedy, the Myths series shifts focus toward fictional characters embedded in American popular culture. These figures emerge from radio, film, literature, and television, existing not as real people but as shared cultural inventions. Still, they function like celebrities, shaped by repetition, familiarity, and mass devotion.
Identity, Persona, and Self-Mythology
Unlike the other works in the portfolio, The Shadow 267 uses Warhol himself as its subject. He casts his image as The Shadow, the masked crime-fighter from the long-running American radio program broadcast between 1937 and 1954. The composition stages a confrontation between Warhol’s physical likeness and his looming silhouette. His face occupies only a narrow portion of the frame, while the shadow stretches across the rest, imposing and impersonal. This imbalance heightens the sense of psychological tension and visual unease.
The hard division between face and shadow suggests a fractured identity. The red tones feel intimate and exposed, while the gray shadow appears anonymous and detached. Warhol signs the work in pencil at the lower right, reinforcing the tension between personal authorship and constructed persona. Although Warhol never explained the image directly, the reference to The Shadow—an alter ego defined by disguise and multiplicity—feels deliberate.
The Shadow 267 in Warhol’s Larger Body of Work
Warhol often treated fame as a surface condition rather than a stable identity. In The Shadow 267, he turns that logic inward. The work suggests a split between public image and private self, between visibility and concealment. Like the radio character who operated behind shifting identities, Warhol positions himself as both subject and symbol. Within the Myths portfolio, this print stands apart as the most introspective, transforming Warhol himself into one of the fictional icons he spent his career observing.
Photo credit: Photograph by Andy Warhol / Courtesy Andy Warhol Foundation / Netflix.
