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 are given at the bottom of the plaque.
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 progressive martyrdom for the media and her public. After her death, Warhol based many works on the same photograph of her, a publicity still for the 1953 film Niagara. He painted the canvas in a single color—turquoise, green, blue, lemon yellow—and then silkscreened Monroe’s face over it, sometimes alone, sometimes doubled, sometimes multiplied in a grid. The gold 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 nevertheless imbues the work with a morbid allure.
By reproducing a photograph of a heroine shared by millions, Warhol denies the sense of the artist's unique personality that was implicit in the gestural painting of the 1950s. He also used a commercial technique, silkscreen printing, that gives the image a clean, artificial appearance; even as Warhol canonizes Monroe, he reveals her public image to be a carefully constructed illusion. Reminiscent of 1950s glamour, the face of Gold Marilyn Monroe is like the star herself: brilliant but fleeting; bold but vulnerable; fascinating but elusive. Surrounded by a void, it is like the dissolve at the end of a film.
