Andy Warhol, Gold Marilyn Monroe, 1962, Offset Lithograph

Andy Warhol, Gold Marilyn Monroe, 1962

Offset Lithograph signed in the plate

Famous Andy Warhol offset lithograph in mint condition!

Authorized by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc,.

Designed in 2013 by McGaw Graphics, Inc.
Edition details appear at the bottom of the plate.

91.5 × 61cm

Marilyn Monroe was a legend when she committed suicide in August 1962, but in retrospect her life seems to have been a gradual martyrdom for the media and her audience. After her death, Warhol based many works on the same photograph of her, a publicity photo for the 1953 film Niagara. He would paint the canvas with a single color, turquoise, green, blue, lemon yellow, and then screen print the face of Monroe on top, sometimes alone, sometimes doubled, sometimes multiplied in a grid. The golden field of Gold Marilyn Monroe (the only one of Warhol's Marilyns to use this color) recalls religious icons from the history of Christian art, a resonance that the work nevertheless imbues with a morbid allure.

By reproducing a photograph of a heroine shared by millions, Warhol negates the sense of uniqueness of the artist's personality that was implicit in the gesture painting of the 1950s. He also used a technique commercial, screen printing, which gives the image a sharp and artificial appearance; even as Warhol canonized Monroe, he revealed that his public image was a carefully structured illusion. Reminiscent of the glamor of the 1950s, Gold Marilyn Monroe's face is like the star herself: brilliant, but ephemeral; bold, yet vulnerable; fascinating, but elusive. Surrounded by a void, it is like the dissolve at the end of a film.