R endered in an incandescent teal-blue palette against a stark black background, Andy Warhol’s Marilyn (Reversal Series) presents a striking reinvention of the artist’s most iconic subject. A radiant example of the final stage of Warhol’s career, this work represents an important moment whereby Warhol returns to his most famous subjects, from Marilyn to Mao to the Mona Lisa, bringing his illustrious Pop career full circle. These Reversal paintings revisit Warhol’s early portraits while reversing their tonal values, as if these later works are the photographic negatives to his early masterpieces.

Considered not only his most recognizable subject, but also one of the most well-known images in all of art history, Warhol’s Marilyns have achieved a mythical status as one of the defining images of contemporary art. Quite literally a textbook-image, Warhol’s depiction of Marilyn exists alongside masterworks such as Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and van Gogh’s Starry Night as archetypal examples representing not just singular movements, but entire centuries of painting. Moreover, as an image ingrained in the cultural psyche of post-war American pop-culture, Warhol’s Marilyns exist beyond the realm of art history, relevant even to those who may never step foot in a museum.

In addition to being Warhol’s most famous subject, Marilyn Monroe was also the most art historically significant figure in his oeuvre. Touching on each for the most important elements of Warhol’s diverse practice – celebrity and glamor, death and tragedy, mass-media and consumerism – Marilyn became an emblem of Warhol’s practice, a singular summary of his legendary oeuvre. Created just weeks after Monroe’s sudden death in August 1962 with a publicity photo for her 1953 film Niagara, Warhol’s first Marilyn paintings capture the media hysteria surrounding the popstar’s shocking suicide. The work launched Warhol’s Disaster series in which he explored the media’s obsession with death, perhaps foreshadowing his own personal preoccupation with the subject.

How the Reversal series revisits these subjects – namely Marilyn Monroe – toward the end of Warhol’s life, it could be read as a memento mori, a contemplation of the artist’s own mortality and fame. In fact, when he died shortly a year later after completing the present work, Warhol’s likeness flooded the covers of global newspapers just as Monroe’s had two decades before. In this work, the glowing aqua contours suggest an ominous or even ghostly presence as they radiate through the stark black canvas, again returning to the theme of memento mori which Warhol had previously explored in his Skull paintings during the 1970s.

As an artist deeply interested in the theme of appropriation, Warhol doubled down on this practice in the last decade of his life by appropriating his own images, which themselves were sourced from mass media and pop culture. In revisiting, appropriating, and transforming his own “trademarked” motifs, Warhol wades into the depths of postmodernism. Bourdon even notes that “By ransacking his own past to produce the Reversals… Warhol revealed himself to be one of the shrewdest of the new wave of post-modernists.” (David Bourdon, “Through the Reflecting Glass Elusively”, in Andy Warhol, New York, 1989, pp. 378-379) Hence, Warhol’s practice spans beyond his Pop-art legacy, also contending with 80s conceptual artists like Richard Prince and John Baldessari who similarly explored the theme of appropriation through a postmodern lens.

Artist

Andy Warhol