“Warhol Marilyn holds a special place in [Sturtevant’s] repertoire…the work is suggestive as an avatar for the figure she cut over the five decades of her career. Sometimes popular, at other times vilified, consistently notorious and latterly applauded. Sturtevant, Monroe, the painting Marilyn by Warhol and Sturtevant’s Warhol Marilyn operate in a feedback loop prompting questions not only in regard to the copy but also concerning celebrity, iconicity and gender.”
E xploring and redefining the tenets of originality, representation and authorship, Sturtevant’s Warhol Marilyns from 1973 magnifies not only one of the most important and immediately recognizable subjects of Andy Warhol’s celebrated career, but also perpetuates the very moment during the early 1960s when Warhol revolutionized the terms of popular visual culture. Conceptually stunning, Sturtevant's repetition in Warhol Marilyns, from 1973, forces the viewer to confront questions of representation and ownership. In selecting the exquisite and radically seductive Marilyns and reinterpreting it only a decade later, Sturtevant negotiates the space between production, critical reception and canonization, leading the viewer to examine the nature of authenticity within contemporary art historical discourse. Both instantly recognizable and demanding of attention, Marilyn Monroe’s direct and sultry eye contact draws the viewer into dialogue with the very essence of Sturtevant’s practice.
Celebrated as the inheritor and perpetuator of the legacy of appropriation art, Sturtevant’s Warhol Marilyn carries on the legacy first begun by Duchamp and his ready-mades, which also influenced Andy Warhol to further redefine the very principles of what we consider to be art. In the present example, Sturtevant recreates a powerfully pared down juxtaposition of Warhol’s legendary diptych of Marilyn Monroe, one of the most recognizable works of art that encapsulates the ultimate symbol of celebrity, sexuality and glamor. Sturtevant’s much larger Warhol Diptych was created the very same year and currently holds the artist’s auction record of $5.1 million, which makes the present fresh-to-market example all the more iconic as a top example from the artist’s boundary-defying body of work. Warhol Marilyns masterfully illuminates how it is possible to not only create in a heavily visual contemporary culture but to also give pre-existing images, or even works of art, a new spirit by reimagining them in a different temporal and spatial context.
“In August 62 I started doing silkscreens. I wanted something stronger that gave more of an assembly line effect. With silkscreening you pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That way you get the same image, slightly different each time. It was all so simple quick and chancy. I was thrilled with it. When Marilyn Monroe happened to die that month, I got the idea to make screens of her beautiful face the first Marilyns."
Right: STURTEVANT, WARHOL DIPTYCH, 1973, SOLD BY CHRISTIE’S IN MAY 2015 FOR $5.1 MILLION (AUCTION RECORD FOR THE ARTIST)
From the time of Monroe's death in August 1962 to the end of that year, Warhol created twenty silkscreen paintings based on a publicity photograph of Monroe from the 1953 film Niagara, an image indelibly etched in the minds of millions worldwide. Just three years later, Sturtevant - a member of Robert Rauschenberg’s entourage - approached Warhol and requested to borrow his silkscreen stencil from his famed Marilyns. Sturtevant later claimed that Warhol agreed begrudgingly and was told by the studio assistant that she could take whichever screen she wished. However, when Sturtevant was unable to find the original silkscreen stencil in Warhol’s loft, the young artist recalled, 'I decided to find the original [Marilyn] Hollywood still, one chance in a million and I found it. I took it to Andy's silkscreen man and it was perfect. A Warhol screen from my photo which was his photo.' (Patricia Lee, Sturtevant: Warhol Marilyn, London, 2016, pp. 19-20). In doing so, Sturtevant’s Warhol Marilyns challenge postmodern discourse and perpetuates the obsession of these two figures of unprecedentedly outsized fame, Marilyn Monroe and Andy Warhol, by powerfully encapsulating and reconceptualizing the extraordinary impact that their visual prowess had played on the history of art.
The work of Sturtevant is some of the most elusive in contemporary art. Best known for exclusively producing works of art that reference and reproduce works made by other artists - her oeuvre includes recreations of now-iconic pieces by Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Joseph Beuys, Robert Gober, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Keith Haring and Roy Lichtenstein among others. In doing so, Sturetevant pushed these works even further beyond the traditional confines of what the world considered to be art, which oftentimes had first been confronted, and battled, by the original creator who also took great leaps to push beyond these traditional boundaries. Sturtevant’s cutting-edge interrogations into the “understructure” of art through her groundbreaking use of appropriation both set her apart from other artists, and situated her as the crucial link between Pop Art and the Pictures Generation of Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine and Cindy Sherman to follow. While Warhol was primarily concerned with the seductive image, surface appeal and art as a commodity, Sturtevant explored the underlying theoretical mechanics of art by daringly usurp Warhol’s forms and techniques in order to push them one step further. In doing so, Sturtevant introduced a caliber of conceptual rigor in her work that was perhaps absent or just at the precipice in Warhol’s.