Andy Warhol

“Warhol turned Marilyn Monroe into an emblem for our age: by constant visual reiteration, he distanced her humanity… Marilyn – victimised in life – became a kind of two-dimensional slogan after Warhol had done with her.” (D. Keith Mano, ‘Warhol – Andy Warhol’, National Review, 22 January, 1988)

The dawning of the 1980s brought with it renewed conceptual vigour to Andy Warhol’s art and found him returning to the kind of artistic form with which he had first found fame in the 1960s. Now, with the silkscreen process refined to perfection, he began to produce powerful post-modern canvases which were amongst the first artworks to use ‘appropriation’ as their direct theme. Buzzing with colour and vitality, these paintings differentiated themselves from previous ones through their subtle manipulation of pre-existing images from art history, among them his own paintings, which by the late 1970s had themselves entered the cultural ether.

The vibrant Day-Glo colours here recall the vibrant and shocking palette of Warhol’s earliest Marilyns where he had deliberately chosen lurid, conflicting hues to transcend the humanity of the recently deceased star. Executed at the creative peak of his late career, the present work belongs to the artist’s retrospective Reversal Series, so called because of the negative, ghostlike impressions created by reversing the silkscreen process. As David Bourdon explained: “Warhol’s Reversals recapitulate his portraits of famous faces…but with the tonal values reversed.  As if the spectator were looking at photographic negatives, highlighted faces have gone dark while former shadows now rush forward in electric hues. The reversed Marilyns, especially, have a lurid otherworldly glow, as if illuminated by internal footlights.” (David Bourdon, Warhol, New York, 1989, p. 378) Here Warhol returns to the best known of all his motifs, reincarnating the image of Marilyn which had gained him widespread fame twenty years earlier. Enveloping the film star’s features in a mysterious, nocturnal veil, he dramatically transforms her pouting visage into a swirling kaleidoscope of electric blues and oranges which invigorate the subject with fresh life and meaning.

Four Multicoloured Marilyns (Reversal Series) exposes the natural evolution that underscored Warhol’s Pop conquest and importantly shows him to be a tireless innovator. In the Reversal Series, he returns to the same questions raised in his original Marilyns with self-referential vigour. Here he is not just scrutinising issues of authorship, authenticity and artistic value but also the legitimacy his own artistic code.

In recycling this ‘signature’ motif in a novel and unexplored context, the result is a striking combination of old and new that demonstrates that by the late 1970s Warhol’s image of Marilyn had now become more famous than Marilyn herself.

Obsessed with the imperfections he perceived in his own appearance, from the outset Warhol had plundered instantly recognisable, glamorous images from the pantheon of modern celebrity to challenge conventional notions of originality and beauty in art. These readily available, ‘Low’ art sources to which he was drawn owed nothing to the traditional artistic practice but rather originated from the utopia of consumerism and popular culture. In doing this, Warhol questioned the validity of ‘high’ art expectations, for after all, what was more beautiful than Marilyn Monroe? And why should a picture of her be considered any less worthy of appreciation or artistic merit than one of Isabella D’Este, Madame de Pompadour or an anonymous woman with an enigmatic smile?

In Marilyn Monroe however, Warhol found a momento mori which could unite the obsessions driving his career: glamour, beauty and death. As a star of the silver screen and the definitive international sex symbol of her era, Marilyn epitomised the fame and glamour of celebrity that Warhol craved.

Warhol’s pictures of Marilyn, Jackie and Liz have been described as modern-age Madonnas, and like Botticelli’s Venus and Leonardo’s Lady With an Ermine, they are portraits radiating the essence of feminine beauty. “They are not photographs of public stars but…icons of our time. They are, in essence, holy.” (Peter Brant in Exhibition Catalogue, New York, C&M Arts, Women of Warhol, Marilyn, Liz & Jackie, 2000, p. 3)  Four Multicoloured Marilyns (Reversal Series) is a post-modern icon and a stunning testament to the innovative effects Warhol achieved in this radical departure late in his career. It has often been said that Warhol made fame famous, and if we accept this as true, by choosing his own legendary image of Marilyn as an icon of celebrity in itself, the Marilyn Reversals become metaphorical self-portraits laying claim to the value and history of his own artistic legacy.