Eternal and haunting, Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe is an idol of terrifying power. It is an image with which our culture is saturated to the extent that to this day its original impact reverberates, is recapitulated, in continuing affirmation of Warhol’s searing inquest into fame and consumerism.
Warhol first created a silkscreen of Monroe in 1962, just weeks after her death at the age of thirty-six. He used a publicity still from her 1953 movie Niagara. The archetypal picture of Monroe in ascension to stardom, this photograph presents a relaxed and sensuous visage: suggestively parted lips, perfect hair, an inviting and smoky gaze. It is a face guilelessly at odds with the brutal and unrelenting serialisation to which Warhol would subject it.
One of the earliest Marilyn works was Marilyn Diptych (1962), in which two panels of twenty-five Marilyns are placed side by side; the left group are in vivid colour, while the adjacent panel is monochrome, afflicted by blurring and distortion, outlines and shadows fading as the faces read from left to right. In this gradual attenuation is captured the loss of Marilyn herself, even as a chromatically fortified ‘image’ of the real person remains luridly alive. This is the imagistic power of mass media in action. The work’s designation as Diptych highlights another important aspect of idolatry. A diptych is typically a double screen of religious figures at the altarpiece of a church: as a devout Byzantine Catholic Warhol was brought up to be keenly aware of the rich history of such imagery, the practices of veneration and adoration informing much of his oeuvre. Enshrined in devotional format, Marilyn becomes the central object of image-worship.
Both in medium and expression, Warhol seamlessly merges this reliquary fetishisation with his chronicling of mediated modernity. As Heiner Bastian writes, even at this early stage in Warhol’s output ‘the aura of utterly affirmative idolisation already stands as a stereotype of a “consumer-goods style” expression of an American way of life and the mass-media culture of a nation, which, in the early 1960s, were creating dreams and hegemonies (according to wholly technical and material premises), in which goods and messages were beholden to mechanisms of consumerism that applied to both alike. In these works the hyper-icons of Pop turn into icons of demonic emptiness; Warhol’s notion of “beauty” cannot be imagined without tragedy.’ (Heiner Bastian, ‘Rituals of Unfulfillable Individuality – The Whereabouts of Emotions,’ in Heiner Bastian, Andy Warhol: Retrospective, London: Tate, 2001).
Warhol’s well-documented factory-line production methods are at perhaps their most poignant in his treatment of Marilyn. The slippages and imperfections of silkscreen do much to convey the human fragility of the real woman, distorted and wearing away through merciless iteration. As a pin-up and sex symbol, she was expected to maintain a paradoxically spotless public image; Warhol exposes the tragic contradictions of such celebrity in his Marilyn’s sphinx-like mask. While the real Marilyn struggled with substance addiction, miscarriages and spousal abuse, here she is a fallen woman made immaculate, radiant in Technicolor series.
Much as his electric chairs or car crashes, there is something macabre in the Marilyns. Brought into being so soon after her untimely death, they capture and preserve her in idealised state, and in a sense she is not allowed to pass away, even as she fades into history. Warhol’s choice of the Niagara publicity shot hit a tragic note when his first Marilyns went on display in Castelli Gallery in 1962; many visitors wept at the face before them, which bears the innocence of her early career before fame and illness took their fatal toll.
While acknowledging the darkness of this mythos, Warhol himself commodifies Marilyn. She is canonised and sold. As emblem of the literally cult-like elements of Pop, she is both fantastically marketable and endlessly fatalistic. The present portfolio renders her in different colours upon each repetition, selling and reselling, modulating in psychedelic variety; this in itself is a mimetic gesture. Just as every American projected their own hopes, desires, and dreams upon the young starlet, so did Warhol’s Factory physically impress upon her with their screens various hues and casts, each time recreating her anew.
In this astonishing work, Warhol fashions himself as demiurge of a culture, a world that is as much of his own creating as it is a glaring reflection of the universe around him. No longer mere documentary likeness, the portrait is invested with the vertiginous and necromantic intensity of the gaze of millions. The aesthetic and the conceptual are subsumed in the flat planes of silkscreen; Marilyn becomes a phenomenal surface of absolute art and absolute merchandise.
