Andy Warhol

Many of today’s artists use images of celebrities in their work as laboratories for stylistic and aesthetic experiments. Warhol, celebrated the world over, chose to make these images for a very simple reason – to enshrine celebrated faces for posterity. For Warhol, everything had a value and everything had a cost. He knew personally the value of art and of performance. In Warhol’s world, however, nothing could be taken at face value. Everything was always highly charged and loaded, whether images of celebrities, of car crashes, long films of buildings or people sleeping, Warhol’s touch elevated these often banal sources to something gnomic, something spiritual. The sense of the Performance runs throughout his work, and here we see that playful, wicked sense of energy in his choice of subject, leaping and dancing around the canvas, infusing the picture plane with majestic bolts of energy. Warhol loved captivating celebrities such as Elizabeth Taylor and Elvis Presley, among so many others, and loved to celebrate the dichotomy of tragedy and beauty in a variety of important pictorial ways.

The present image is electric. Warhol has amplified the already startling double ‘close-up’ image of Marilyn Monroe through his use of vibrant colors. The pinks, greens and blues are pushed to the forefront of the picture plane by the saturated black.  Marilyn’s face seems to wrestle with the pictorial ground, lending the image an extraordinary visual punch. This isolated face, with its shocks of bursting color shooting out of the composition in a number of directions, seems anchored to nothing, suggesting that the heads are suspended, as if Warhol has altered Marilyn into some psychedelic figure. His image has been fleetingly captured from the ether of his own creativity.

The familiar image of Marilyn’s celebrity still portrait taken in the year of her tragic death would capture the viewer’s attention regardless of the mass of color and texture contained in the composition.  This is a candid reproduction, unsentimental in view and is, of course, at odds with the highly charged means of execution and his adoption of a playful celebrity. Even so, when the early Marilyn portraits from 1962 and later were first shown at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, many viewers were deeply moved, seeing these images as memento mori. Little did those viewers know that these would be the most important portrait series of his oeuvre. Despite the artificiality of her appearance, Marilyn’s face is still reconcilable with that of the young starlet prior to her early death in 1964.  These Reversal Marilyn portraits, executed in a number of compositions and in a numbers of images, see Warhol acutely aware of human vanity and prepare both himself and his viewer to contemplate our own mortality..