IT’S ALL so predictable. If I had been asked to bet on the style that Robbie Williams would choose to produce a self- portrait, I would immediately have put my money on an Andy Warhol silkscreen.

This is not because as a Robbie fan I know he’s been collecting Warhols since 1999, but because it’s so perfect. The style of the artist whose name became synonymous with celebrity-obsessed culture now stamps his name like a brand on that culture’s biggest star. Robbie Williams is a product of everything that Warhol predicted, the apotheosis of the famous 15 minutes of fame.

The prints, which went under the hammer for £2,300 yesterday at Bloomsbury Auctions, found themselves in the eminent artistic company of such masters as Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Peter Blake and Gillian Ayres.

Yet there’s nothing artistically original about Williams’s self-portraits. They represent no more than a few publicity mug-shots brightened up with the odd square of layered colour. They are mere repetitions of the endlessly repeated ideas of an artist who put culture upon the production line.

Does that mean, then, that Williams’s self-portraits reproduce and perpetuate a Warholian vision? But Warhol’s real importance resides less in the visual surface than in the realm of ideas beneath. Warhol may have tried to eradicate his character, but in blanking his identity he made it stronger. The ultimate groupie became the superstar. In these self-portraits, Williams shows us the superstar who turned back to groupie.

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