“In August ‘62 I started doing silkscreens… I wanted something stronger that gave more of an assembly line effect… when Marilyn Monroe happened to die that month, I got the idea to make screens of her beautiful face – the first Marilyns.” — Andy Warhol
When Andy Warhol heard of Marilyn Monroe’s untimely death in August 1962 – the same month he began experimenting with the silkscreen technique, which would come to define his career – the artist immediately began to immortalise the muse in an extended project of screenprinted repetitions. Drawing from a publicity still of Monroe taken for the film Niagara (1953), Warhol cropped the original photograph to further accentuate the starlet’s striking facial features, and obsessively repeated the image in a series of over fifty paintings.
“The irony of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn is that it is an icon of an icon created by an icon.” i
Enamoured with the screenprinting technique, which allowed the artist to repeat his source material with even greater efficiency and detachment, Warhol founded his own print publishing business Factory Additions in 1967. For his first portfolio published and distributed through Factory Additions, Warhol revisited the youthful visage of the Hollywood actress, creating ten screenprints of this signature motif in an even more tightly cropped format. Identical in composition, the ten screenprints only differ in their varied palettes. Warhol utilised five screens to print each image from the portfolio: one that carried the photographic impression, and the other four to achieve the different layers of radiant colours that enhance the graphic power of each print.
“I knew I belonged to the public and to the world, not because I was talented or even beautiful, but because I had never belonged to anything or anyone else.”
— Marilyn Monroe
Through his adoption of commercial imagery, proliferated in vibrant colours using a technique intended for mass production, Warhol’s visual treatment of Marilyn has effectively transformed a photograph of the universally recognised Hollywood star into an emblem of American Pop. Yet, besides defining the aesthetic of the post-war movement, the portraits have further acquired a timeless appeal through the cropping, enlarging, decontextulising and endless reproduction of the original photograph. As a result, the enigmatic smile of Monroe has lingered in the collective consciousness for more than six decades following her death, continuing to capture public imagination and inspire artistic creation alike.
