Andy Warhol

Bonlow Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above

When the Mona Lisa embarked on her first voyage outside Europe, to America on 14th December 1962, she could not travel by plane, but instead she travelled as the Queen of England would on a State visit, by ship. As Donald Sassoon describes: “She was taken to Le Havre, escorted by a motorcade and ‘welcomed’ by the captain of the liner S.S. France … she was then installed in a specially arranged first class compartment, in a purpose-built waterproof box that would float if the ship sank. In other words, she was safer than the passengers and crew – after all the world is full of sailors but there is only one Mona Lisa” (Donald Sassoon, Mona Lisa, The history of the world’s most famous painting, London 2001, p. 244).

 

Her arrival in America was a major media event, and the exhibition tour to Washington’s National Gallery and New York’s Metropolitan Museum was covered by wave upon wave of photographers, both amateur and professional, each hoping to capture the essence of her fame. The press devoted vast column inches to analysing her wondrous beauty and furthermore her celebrity as the world’s most famous work of art. Her visit to the United States was seen by John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jackie, as a way of improving French-American relations and, indeed, many of the photographers juxtaposed the radiant smile of Jackie with the ‘enigmatic’ one of Mona Lisa. She was a media star in the truest sense of the word and by the end of her trip, over 1.6 million people had seen her. Amongst them was one of America’s hottest young artists, Andy Warhol.

The effect was quite immediate. That same year, Warhol began a love affair with the Mona Lisa which would last intermittently for most of the rest of his life. His first painting using her image, Thirty are better than one (see Fig. 1) was completed in 1963 and the Mona Lisa was the only painting from the history of art that he would use until the early 1980s. Although he produced relatively few works on this subject during the early 1960s, he would return to her with a wider expanse of works between 1978 and 1980 as part of the Retrospective series, of which Two White Mona Lisas is one of the finest and most elegant examples.

Mona Lisa seems tailor-made for Andy Warhol’s adoration. Allegedly the portrait of a little known Florentine lady, ‘Monna’ Lisa Gherardini, painted by Leonardo circa 1503, it is her image which lives on in the public eye. Her fragile and precious nature means that she rarely, if ever, travels and hence, her fame is known to most around the world solely by her reproduction. Detached from her author, she is the most photographed and reproduced work of art in the world and the fascination with the Mona Lisa ‘brand’ extends her legend through replicas and souvenirs as well as books and postcards. She has attained an eternal and immortal status which is somewhat removed from the humble origins of the original painting. Films have been made about her and songs have been written about her, many of which develop her persona into that of a living being.

Of course many artists have also attempted to adopt the image of Mona Lisa. Jean Dubuffet, Robert Rauschenberg and Rene Magritte to name but a few. However it is the Mona Lisas of Warhol and Marcel Duchamp which are most renowned. While Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q could be regarded, in 1919, as an attempt to subvert high culture, by the 1960s the Mona Lisa was no longer high culture, but a popular cultural icon. When Warhol came to this subject, he was not reacting to the painting as such, more to its fame and, by extension, the power of the image in general in our media saturated culture. Here, Warhol has reversed the positive and negative aspects of the image to achieve a ghostly dematerialisation of the subject. Furthermore his expressive, yet precise layering of thick white paint onto an immaculately smooth layer of off-white paint creates an ethereal quality hinting at the potential disappearance of the image. The shadowy portrait is now reduced to its distant recognition value, as the image becomes a depiction of memory.

In order to achieve this cast to the image, Warhol has borrowed from another eminent  history, that of the Monochrome painting. By adapting the simple refinement of the painting process which was so studiously pursued by his immediate forefathers, such as Ad Reinhardt, earlier in the Twentieth Century, Warhol was trying to create a finality to the image, a memory of its existence, in much the same way as Ad Reinhardt was trying to bring finality to painting. One is engaged in a kind of ‘spot the difference’. On the right, the fuller image keenly details most of the original aspects of the painting, whilst on the left, the much fuller application of the top layer of paint leaves little room for intricacy as the image disappears into the thick layers below. This combined with the luscious thickly applied impasto which implies vast ‘expressive’ sweeps of a fully loaded brush, symbolic of his 1970s works, gives Two White Mona Lisas a mesmeric beauty to add to its obvious visual gravitas.

It must have been fate that brought Andy Warhol together with the world’s most famous work of art in 1963 at such a vital point in his career. Completely intrigued by contemporary society’s obsession with celebrity and the reproduced image, and a keen student of the great masters of Art History, finally he was confronting the real thing, the ultimate art celebrity. A highly ambitious young man, he thoroughly believed in the longevity of art at a time when our digestion of images was increasing at a furious pace. He aspired to make great works of art which would live long in history and outlast him, in the same way that the Mona Lisa had outlasted Leonardo. Following a seventeen year relationship with the image, Two White Mona Lisas shows the ultimate Post-Modern painter adopting the ultimate Renaissance image and creating an entirely new icon of our times. More than that, Two White Mona Lisas combines dazzling visual beauty with a deep conceptual intelligence whose relevance transgresses time.