How “Succession” Used Art to Foreshadow Its Most Shocking Twist Yet

Since HBO’s Succession premiered in 2018, fine art has been a centerpiece of the series’s backdrop.

Peter Paul Rubens’s Tiger, Lion and Leopard Hunt (1616) electrifies the first season’s poster, while William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s Dante And Virgil (1850) hangs above the mantle in the poster for the second season. In the latter image, we also see a table of seated Roys that makes for a power-hungry take on Norman Rockwell’s Freedom from Want (1943).

In the current and final season, Logan Roy’s Manhattan apartment walls boast a Golden Age Dutch landscape and an Impressionist buffet, including works by Honoré Daumier, Paul Gauguin, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. This selection appears traditionalist compared to the more modern, contemplative works that we see hanging in competing media maven Nan Pierce’s California compound—including a color field painting by Ronnie Lanfield—as if to reinforce the polarizing ideologies of their media conglomerates.

Clearly, the connection between art and the series’s characters should not be ignored. And now, in the wake of the plot twist in season four, episode three (spoilers to follow), it seems that the show’s curatorial decisions may have left us a clue of what was to come. (Readers who have not yet watched season four, episode three, may want to stop now.)

Indeed, a pair of artworks may have foreshadowed the fate of Logan Roy: death due to cardiac catastrophe, mid-air on an enormous private jet.

Since the episode aired on Sunday evening, TV critics have lauded the writers’ ability to make Logan’s death feel like a surprise. However, as Kathryn VanArendonk of Vulture pointed out, we could have, and should have, seen this coming. In addition to various plot points throughout the show’s run, we could have focused more closely on the art at Connor Roy’s rehearsal dinner at the landmark New York restaurant The Grill in the previous episode: two iterations of Andy Warhol’s 1986 Self-Portrait.

Warhol’s two versions of Self-Portrait, which appear on screen for almost a minute, strike an overtly narrative and prescient cord. This sense of foreboding becomes even more obvious when one examines the portraits’ significance, their construction, and the parallels between Warhol’s and Logan’s legacies.

Created only one year before Warhol’s own abrupt death in 1987 by cardiac arrhythmia, the 1986 series of six paintings, made from acrylic and screen print on canvas, pit a closely cropped image of Warhol’s head (colored a different effervescent hue in each version) against a black background.

The artist’s face, angular yet flat, flickers in the darkness like a hologram coming in and out of definition. With his lips parted to reveal an inky abyss, you can almost hear the artist take his last shallow breath. Look at the work closely, and Warhol’s flesh morphs into the outline of a skull, elevating the portrait to the memento mori canon. It’s here that Warhol’s obsession with celebrity, death, and self coalesce.

That is perhaps why, consciously or subconsciously, Succession’s creatives chose to film Connor Roy’s soon-to-be wife, Willa Ferreyra, standing in front of a white-and-green Self-Portrait. The painting looms behind her as she’s caught by the rest of the Roy siblings escaping for “a little drink” in the middle of her rehearsal dinner.

While we may initially interpret the paintings as a nod to the potential demise of Willa and Connor’s nuptials, in hindsight, the dialogue points to a forthcoming funeral. “I’m not vital from here,” Willa says, justifying her exit. In reply, Logan’s daughter, Shiv Roy, asks, “Are you okay?”

This line is echoed in the siblings’ absurdist and tragic attempt to figure out if their dad is actually dead in episode three, asking “Is he okay?” and in the parting words Shiv delivers to Logan via cell phone: “Hey, Dad. Uh, hello. Um, you’re gonna be okay.”

The connection between Warhol and Logan only solidifies further when we examine the unique process by which Warhol created Self-Portrait in 1986.

According to art dealer Tony Shifrazi, Warhol began his work by taking a photograph. He then would have a photographic laboratory enlarge the selected picture and transfer it to an acetate sheet. The mark of Warhol’s own hand came in when he outlined his face and features on the canvas. Finally, he would complete the painting by squeegeeing ink onto the marked canvas, aided by an assistant.

Just as Warhol relied on others to produce his art (he once said, “I think somebody should be able to do all my paintings for me”), Logan often leverages the army of staff that works for him at Waystar Royco, including his children, to build his empire—and often, in the process, do his dirty work. It’s not a coincidence that minutes before his own death, Logan instructed his youngest son, Roman Roy, to fire a key executive, Gerri Kellman, in a wicked test of loyalty.