In his epoch-defining pop art career, Andy Warhol famously made icons of Marilyn Monroe, the dollar bill and the Campbell’s soup can in the most colourful and superficial way possible.

These images outshine everything they surround, including the man who created them. What’s more, excavating the stuff of his own soul via psychoanalytical silkscreen prints was not for him.

“If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me,” he famously said. “There I am. There’s nothing behind it.”

Yet there was clearly more to the man who painted electric chairs and Brillo pad boxes than he ever wanted to discuss. His self-portraits — which feature in a groundbreaking show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art — are a good deal more revealing than his rambling (although intriguing and star-studded) diaries and films.

How does an artist obsessed with fame and celebrity, an outsider who became the epicentre of an art movement, portray himself? He may be making an attempt to represent the surface — but surely the surface he chose to represent, and the way he does so, tells us something?

These are questions which, until now, no exhibition has attempted to address. Despite the huge, and ongoing, fascination with Warhol, his demimondean entourage and his massively influential work, there has never before been a serious attempt to collect together in one place all the self-portraits during his career.

He showed a series of early ones in Montreal in 1968 and Anthony d’Offay, the London dealer, commissioned and showed a series in 1986, the year before Warhol died. But next month’s Edinburgh show is the first to start with his quirky juvenilia and end with the final, haunting images of his face.

The curators are convinced that this collection is both important and revealing. The original idea came from Dietmar Elger, of the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, and Keith Hartley, the chief curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, who is responsible for bringing it to Edinburgh. He is convinced that, although Warhol’s paintings of other people are familiar, he deserves his moment in the spotlight. His own 15 minutes of fame.

According to Hartley it is Warhol’s enigmatic nature that makes a selection of his self-images such an intriguing proposition.

“He was secretive and shy — yet he loved to go to parties,” he says. “When he gave interviews he always answered yes or no, even if the question began what or when.

“He appeared to have a vacant, dumb quality, acting as if he was naive or stupid. I don’t think that was unusual in the 1960s — people did not want to reveal too much — but he took it to an extreme. It became a facade behind which to hide. And then the facade became permanent. The mask became the skin.”

Most commentators agree that Warhol’s desire to hide had deep roots. Born in tough, blue-collar Pittsburgh to a Polish immigrant family, he was an outsider from the start. His response was to surround himself with glamorous photographs of film stars, including a signed one of Shirley Temple, devour movies and fan magazines and escape to New York.

Arriving there in the 1950s, he was almost as out of place among the art scene’s macho abstract impressionists as he had been in Pittsburgh. Yet working on Madison Avenue as a commercial artist — most famously illustrating shoes for the I Miller company — he was acutely aware of the techniques of advertising and the power of image.

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