Marilyn Monroe (Warhol)

In the 1950s, Andy Warhol established himself as a successful commercial illustrator in New York City, producing advertisements for I. Miller shoes and illustrations for magazines including Glamour, The New York Times, Vogue, and Harper's Bazaar.^[2]

In the early 1960s, Warhol transitioned from commercial illustration to Pop art, creating works based on everyday consumer products such as Campbell's Soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles. In 1962, he began experimenting with the silkscreen painting, replacing the more handmade rubber-stamp techniques he had previously used.^[3] The method allowed him to reproduce photographic images repeatedly while retaining slight variations between impressions.^[3]

Marilyn Monroe, born Norma Jeane Mortenson, rose to fame in the 1950s after signing a contract with Twentieth Century-Fox.^[4] She became one of Hollywood’s most recognizable actresses, appearing in films such as The Asphalt Jungle (1950), All About Eve (1950), and The Seven Year Itch (1955).^[4] A publicity still photographed by Gene Kornman for the film Niagara (1953) later became the source image for many of Warhol's Marilyn works.^[5] Despite her celebrity status, Monroe often struggled against Hollywood's typecasting of her as a "dumb blonde" stereotype.^[6] She died from a barbiturate overdose on August 4, 1962, at the age of 36.^[4]

Following Monroe's death, Warhol repeatedly returned to her image as a subject throughout the 1960s. His earliest works included Gold Marilyn Monroe (1962), the Flavor Marilyns (1962) Marilyn Diptych (1962), and Marilyn x 100 (1962).^[7] In 1964, he produced a group of painted Marilyn canvases that later became known as the Shot Marilyns after performance artist Dorothy Podber fired a revolver through a stack of the works at Warhol’s Factory studio.^[7]

Warhol continued revisiting Monroe's image in later series, including Reversals and Retrospectives, but his final major treatment of the actress came in 1967 with the Marilyn Monroe portfolio, a set of ten screenprints distinguished by their vivid, Technicolor-inspired palette.^[8]

Warhol's style evolved over his career, becoming bolder and more graphic.^[9] In 1962, he adopted what would become his trademark, the screen printing technique that defined his works. Recalling this shift in his memoir Popism (1980), Warhol said: "In August '62 I started doing silkscreens. The rubber-stamp method I'd been using to repeat images suddenly seemed too homemade; I wanted something stronger that gave more of an assembly-line effect."^[3]

The mechanical repetition of images appealed to Warhol as an extension of mass production and commercial printing.^[1][10] His silkscreen process involved transferring photographic images onto mesh screens and layering individual colors one at a time using separate frames and a squeegee. For the prints in Untitled from Marilyn Monroe, Warhol used five different screens for each image.^[9][1]

Published under the imprint Factory Additions, Warhol's print portfolios adapted imagery from some of his best-known paintings into more widely distributed editions.^[11] These included Marilyn Monroe, Campbell's Soup I, Campbell's Soup II, Flowers, and Electric Chairs. For the 1967 Marilyn Monroe portfolio, production of the ten screenprints was overseen by David Whitney, who selected many of the color combinations and submitted them to Warhol for approval.^[11] Warhol himself was reportedly absent during much of the proofing process.^[11] The resulting ten 36 × 36 inch prints were among his most technically ambitious works to date, with an array of colors such as fiery reds, vivid pinks, and other saturated hues.^[11]

Warhol's use of complementary and high-contrast colors became a hallmark of his work and contributed to his association with the visual language of 1960s consumer culture.^[12] Though the composition remained constant across the portfolio, each variation conveyed a distinct emotional tone through color alone.^[13]

The portfolio of ten was printed in an edition of 250, some signed by Warhol.^[9][1]

In Untitled from Marilyn Monroe, Warhol deconstructs a film star and her artificial media typecast.^[14][15][1] Warhol transformed Monroe's ubiquitous typecast as an enduring sex icon and femme fatale^[16][17] into a creative silkscreened print.^[18] This objectification of Monroe was possible in a society that valued products and brands over people.^[1] His minimal use of detail and heavy outlines exaggerated and maintained Monroe's striking facial features and her sculpted hair through the colourful repetitions,^[18] which suggest more to the artwork and the concept of cyclic history.^[1][19]

The original still was also cropped by Warhol to bring Monroe's iconic features into focus to exhibit her social status and portray her as being closer to the audience. The detached nature of, and the minor changes among, the ten prints, attributable to the imperfections, smudges and blurriness from the silkscreen technique, emphasise the disconnect between the public and the private Monroe.^[1][18][19] These small imperfections can also be viewed as Warhol's comment on the rise of mass production in the 1960s.^[20]

Warhol challenged popular press who chose to expose Monroe's private life through media, by rather featuring her public identity through an art form that closely resembled print media. Monroe strived to keep her privacy, "I don't want everybody to see exactly where I live, what my sofa or fireplace looks like... I want to stay just in the fantasy of Everyman". Warhol paid tribute to her desires through the prints, which drive attention away from her private moments and close in on her beauty and her role as a model and an actress.^[18]

Warhol's attraction to catastrophic events for use as subject matter is clear in his choice of Monroe as a subject, closely after her death in 1962. The event was considered an American tragedy.^[14]

The impact of Warhol pioneering the Pop art movement was in his ability to break down the separation between high-class art such as historic and expressionist, and low-class art, such as commercial and the more mundane.^[14][15] The endurance of the works and the growth in price is attributed to the fact that Warhol's art is still relevant and reflective of today's glamour and the consumer culture.^[21]

Individual prints from the Marilyn Monroe portfolio are held in the collections of institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City,^[22] the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia,^[23] and the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago.^[24] Complete sets of the portfolio are owned by the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City as well as the Tate in London.^[25][26][27]

The Marilyn Monroe set was originally priced at $500, but many of the sets were broken up so the prints could be sold individually.^[7] Whilst the original silkscreen paintings made by hand are worth millions, the prints are also sold for a much lower price.^[1][28] Individual prints from the set have sold for up to $515,300 at auction.^[29][30]