At first glance, the four Mona Lisas of Andy Warhol’s Mona Lisa Four Times, 1973, seem identical. The two bust-length portraits and two close-ups of Mona Lisa are silkscreened on a ground of thick, near-black paint, which gives the work a mysterious aura akin to that of the original. And like Leonardo da Vinci’s 1503 portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, Mona Lisa Four Times rewards close looking. Diligent inspection reveals how the amount of ink used for each print shifts the shadows of Mona Lisa’s face, creating the illusion of an enigmatic expression: that infamous Mona Lisa smile.

 

Warhol revisited the Mona Lisa motif repeatedly over the course of his career, beginning in 1963, the year da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. This historic loan was facilitated by another famous Warholian subject, First Lady Jackie Kennedy, who personally convinced the French Cultural Minister to send the work across the ocean. The present work dates to the midpoint of Warhol’s sustained artistic investigation into the Renaissance subject matter, which lasted into the late 1970s. Mona Lisa Four Times engages Warhol’s key artistic pursuits of celebrity, pop culture, and seriality at a grand art historical scale, while at the same time grounding the iconic image in the visual language of his early 1970s art practice.

 

José Diaz, former chief curator of The Andy Warhol Museum, suggests that Warhol saw the Mona Lisa’s arrival in New York in 1963 as more than the arrival of a famous, historical painting, but rather, as a pop cultural moment in and of itself.ⁱ Indeed, the painting’s arrival in the United States was akin to that of an international superstar, as crowds of spectators and flocks of newspaper reporters with flashbulb cameras greeted it in the harbor.ⁱⁱ The White House promised the painting as much security as a visiting head of state; while on view at the Met, for instance, it was guarded by two Secret Service men and two NYPD officers, in addition to the Met’s own security detail.ⁱⁱⁱ Well over a million people saw the painting in the few short weeks it spent in the United States.^iv In this cultural context, Mona Lisa is as iconic of a Warholian subject as any; the 1500s model became another emblem of mid-century American pop culture, just like Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, and even the Campbells soup can.

 

For the initial Mona Lisa silkscreens, Warhol used images of the painting from the Met’s museum program. The museum brochure functions as “publicity photos” of Mona Lisa, parallel to the magazine images Warhol used for his screen prints of other celebrity subjects. The promotional source of Warhol’s Mona Lisa image, combined with the history of screen printing as a medium used to produce advertisements, emphasizes Warhol’s key artistic theme of fame as commodification of the self. With Warhol’s silkscreens, Mona Lisa becomes a commodity; it is no longer a unique Italian Renaissance masterwork, or portrait of an individual person from history. It is an icon of Western art, repeatable ad infinitum across Warhol’s canvases.

 

 

Warhol’s reproduction of a reproduction of the Mona Lisa calls his series (Mona Lisa Four Times included) into conversation with Marcel Duchamp’s intervention with the famous painting, L.H.O.O.Q., 1919. Coincidentally, Warhol met Duchamp in 1963, so it is possible that his personal relationship to the famous Modernist influenced how he approached the Mona Lisa as a subject.^v Like Warhol, Duchamp engages with a reproduction of Mona Lisa—in his case, a museum postcard of her likeness—onto which he’s drawn a mustache, goatee and crude French pun. Both artists—Duchamp, through the absurdity of his drawing, and Warhol, through the volume of reproductions and variations he made—call the viewer’s attention to the commodification of art, and how, through overexposure, an image can lose its initial meaning.

 

But, where old meaning is lost, new meaning can be found. This is the case with Mona Lisa Four Times, which, dating to 1973, comes two thirds of the way through Warhol’s Mona Lisa series. Early works in the series, such as Thirty are Better than One, 1963, The Brandt Foundation, New York, rely on the sheer volume of reproduction for their artistic effect. Mona Lisa is stripped bare to her iconic features, repeated, seemingly, to infinity. A later work, Four Mona Lisas, 1978, Art Institute of Chicago, draws on the painterly, bright colors of Warhol’s Mao repetitions. Mona Lisa Four Times, however, marks a subtle mid-point, building off of the earlier series to create a work that draws on the legendary ambiguity of the original.

 

 

 

In the present work, Warhol limits himself to four Mona Lisas, printed in black against a near-black background. The pairings of Mona Lisas—two bust-length portraits, and two close-ups—bring out the slight variations between them. Warhol claimed to love the mechanical quality of screen printing, but it is the artist’s hand that comes across in Mona Lisa Four Times. The Mona Lisa at bottom left, for instance, seems to have been printed with more ink on the screen than the Mona Lisa at bottom right; the shadows of her face are darker, suggesting that more ink bled through onto the surface below.

 

Beyond marking the artist’s hand (or silkscreen), the variation in Mona Lisa’s expression in Mona Lisa Four Times recalls the original sitter’s enigmatic smile, which seems to shift, depending on the viewer’s perspective, thanks to da Vinci’s masterful application of thin, glistening layers of oil paint. Warhol calls on this aspect of the original with his own application of paint—heavy and dark, to the background of the work. The paint is so thick that it adds ridges under the clean lines of the screen prints, giving further variation to the ostensibly uniform screen.

 “All my images are the same, but very different at the same time… Isn’t life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?”
—Andy Warhol

The muted color palette recalls the tones of da Vinci’s palette, as the background color—almost, but not quite, the same shade as the black screen prints—seems to shift in tone depending on the source of light, from warm grey, to an almost chocolate-colored hue. It is as if Warhol’s Mona Lisas are shrouded in smoke, or fog, or that the viewer has come across them in the dead of night. In his own style, Warhol calls on the enduring mystery of Mona Lisa—her varying appearance, and mysterious aura—in Mona Lisa Four Times.

 

Leonardo da Vinci was known for being a Renaissance man—not just in the sense that he was a man living in the Renaissance, but in that his artistic output crossed genres and disciplines, embracing natural sciences, physics, music, and architecture. Andy Warhol, too, was a Renaissance man, involved in filmmaking, music, television production, writing, and even fashion. “Warhol encompassed the culture of his period just as da Vinci did,” Diaz says. As for Warhol’s interpretation of Mona Lisa Four Times? The curator thinks “da Vinci would be flattered.”^vi

 

 

ⁱ José Diaz, quoted in Barbara Klein, “When Warhol Met Mona,” Carnegie Magazine, Spring 2019, online.

ⁱⁱ “U.S.A.: ‘Mona Lisa’ Arrives In New York On Trip To Washington,” 1962. Archival newsreel, accessed via British Pathé, online.

ⁱⁱⁱ “Famous Foreign Lady Captures Heart of New York,” 1963. Archival video, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, online. Aleksander Gelfand, “Today in Met History: February 4,” The Met Museum Archives (blog), Feb. 4, 2013, online.

^iv “1,077,521 Saw ‘Mona Lisa,’” The New York Times, Mar. 6, 1963, online.

^v Antje Dallman, “Andy Warhol—A Chronology in America,” in Heiner Bastian, Andy Warhol: Retrospective, exh. cat., Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Tate Modern, London, 2001, p. 294.
^vi Ibid.