ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987)
One Grey Marilyn, from Reversal Series, 1986
silkscreen ink and synthetic polymer on canvas
printed signature stamp in two places (on the verso)
18 x 14in. (45.6 x 35.4cm.)
ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987)
One Grey Marilyn, from Reversal Series, 1986
silkscreen ink and synthetic polymer on canvas
printed signature stamp in two places (on the verso)
18 x 14in. (45.6 x 35.4cm.)
Waddington Galleries, London;
Christie's, New York, Contemporary Art, October 8, 1992, lot 147.
Andy Warhol Reversal Series, Waddingon Galleries, London, September, 1987; Marilyn, Staley-Wise Gallery, New York, October 14 - November 13, 1999; Marilyn Monroe: Photographs from the Collection of Michaela and Leon Constantiner, Tel Aviv Museum, Israel, May 13 - September 25, 2004; I Wanna Be Loved By You: Photographs of Marilyn Monroe from the Leon and Michaela Constantiner Collection, Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York November 12, 2004 - April 3, 2005, Toledo Museum of Art and Bass Museum of Art.
Andy Warhol's Marilyn has become perhaps the single most famous image in post-war art. Warhol took as his source a cropped section of a studio publicity still from Monroe's 1953 film Niagara. The idea of creating this modern icon came to him shortly after her tragic death in August 1962, situating this image at the juncture of the artist's obsessive interests in celebrity and the shocking randomness of death and disaster, themes explored through such subjects from this era as his portraits of Jackie Kennedy and his 'Car Crash' series. He made individual and multiple-image versions of Marilyn and these contributed significantly to his own celebrity.
Warhol's Reversal Series versions of Marilyn have the ghostly quality of photographic negatives, the subject abstracted as a spectre, more spirit than substance. The present version of Marilyn was made in the year before the artist's death, and the sombre register of tone bestows on it an appropriately elegiac aura.
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