“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."
Nine Marilyns from 1962 represents not only one of the most important and immediately iconic examples of Andy Warhol’s celebrated output, but also a uniquely searing iteration of perhaps the most infamous visage in contemporary popular culture. Belonging to a moment of extraordinary change in this most legendary of artistic careers, during which Warhol revolutionized the terms of popular visual culture in the early 1960s, the present work epitomizes the monumental themes of Warhol's career: namely, an unprecedented artistic interrogation into the agencies of mass-media, celebrity, and death. In Marilyn Monroe, Warhol found the ultimate embodiment of these artistic obsessions. Rendered in succession with startling clarity and crispness against a luminous sterling background—conjuring the silver screen of the cinema—Warhol captures Monroe’s visage with a haunting power. The metallic expanse of the canvas accentuates the irrefutable mortality of its ill-fated subject, as Monroe's immortal beauty is so exquisitely captured and offered up for perpetual consumption. The depiction of nine perfectly registered impressions in sequence across three rows positions the present work amongst Warhol’s key masterpieces, aligning it with the best of his early serial images. 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. Of those twenty, there are only six serial Marilyn paintings in which her face is repeated in nine or more screens; the present work is one of only two from this esteemed group still in private hands. Uniting two figures of unprecedentedly outsize fame, Marilyn Monroe and Andy Warhol, Nine Marilyns powerfully encapsulates the extraordinary impact Warhol’s praxis has had on the history of art and pop culture at large.
Serial Marilyns With Nine or More Impressions
In the present example, the hauntingly mesmeric black and white portrait of Monroe is repeated nine times. While the absence of color here exposes the ruled pencil lines which guided Warhol’s impression, the silkscreen endows the composition with a luminous silver veil that obliquely references Hollywood’s “silver screen," while also calling to mind the repetitive printings of black-and-white tabloid papers, which, even before Monroe's highly publicized death, had already rendered Monroe's portrait an image ubiquitous in popular culture at the time. In some impressions of Monroe’s portrait, black ink pools thickly, nearly obliterating Monroe’s ghostly visage, while in others, her silhouette renders only as a faint trace, a barely visible impression that appears to recede from the canvas before the viewer’s eyes. The serial repetition takes on the sinister quality of the very tabloid papers which both tortured her life and glamorized her death.
Art © 2021 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
“An art like Warhol’s is necessarily parasitic upon the myths of its time, and indirectly therefore upon the machinery of fame and publicity that market these myths; and it is not at all unlikely that these myths that move us will be unintelligible (or at least starkly dated) to generations that follow. This is… to register an advance protest against the advent of a generation that will not be as moved by Warhol’s beautiful, vulgar, heart-breaking icons of Marilyn Monroe as I am. These, I think, are the most successful pieces in the show… because… Marilyn is one of the overriding myths of our time.”
Newspaper accounts of Monroe's tragic death appeared on the East Coast on the morning of August 6, 1962; the New York Mirror headline announced: "Marilyn Monroe Kills Self—Found Nude in Bed … Hand on Phone … Took 40 Pills.” For Warhol, Monroe exuded the sultry glamour of Hollywood’s Golden Age, a powerhouse of the silver screen whose personal life was nevertheless plagued with tragedy. Though she was one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars, she was never considered seriously as an actress, and struggled with addiction throughout her short life. Her three high-profile marriages—to James Dougherty, Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller—all ended in divorce. Of all Andy Warhol's celebrity subjects, none seem more perfectly emblematic of how the artist perceived and synthesized America than Marilyn Monroe. Warhol saw in Monroe all the promise, beauty, pleasure, fame and tragedy that 1960s America was capable of realizing, and under Warhol’s hand, Monroe’s famed countenance is reduced to but one more mass-produced image in Warhol’s artistic lexicon. In his Marilyn portraits—especially the earliest serial silkscreens including the present work—it is impossible to locate what one might call the truth of the subject. By design, Warhol appears to welcome the many, mask-like guises that at once obscure, protect and seemingly define Monroe: actress, sex symbol, innocent ingenue, Hollywood product.
When Warhol's series of Marilyns were shown for the first time at Stable Gallery in November 1962, they struck a chord not only within artistic circles but across a nation grieving for a beloved star. The exhibition was met with critical acclaim as a contribution to the canon (one painting was even purchased from the show by the Museum of Modern Art, New York) and the series garnered popular praise as a tribute to Monroe and her tragic passing. Writing in Art International in December 1962, Michael Fried perceptively identified the power of these paintings: “An art like Warhol’s is necessarily parasitic upon the myths of its time, and indirectly therefore upon the machinery of fame and publicity that market these myths; and it is not at all unlikely that these myths that move us will be unintelligible (or at least starkly dated) to generations that follow. This is… to register an advance protest against the advent of a generation that will not be as moved by Warhol’s beautiful, vulgar, heart-breaking icons of Marilyn Monroe as I am. These, I think, are the most successful pieces in the show… because… Marilyn is one of the overriding myths of our time.” (Michael Fried, "New York Letter," Art International, 20 December 1962, p. 57) Alongside Elvis, Marlon Brando, and Liz Taylor, Marilyn's iconic face sits at the apex of a pantheon of film-stars canonized into the annals of art history.
Warhol's exceptional aptitude to seize the most potent images of his time defines him as the consummate twentieth-century history painter. Inasmuch as his canvas implicates our fascination with mortality and a certain voyeurism of death, as well as being sourced in the reportage of notorious contemporary events, Warhol’s masterpiece advances a heritage proposed by the likes of Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat, Francisco Goya’s The Third of May, Theodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa and Pablo Picasso’s Guernica. Warhol's Nine Marilyns powerfully sums up the extraordinary contribution Warhol made to the lexis and praxis of art, and continues this illustrious line of precedent as a defining History Painting of the Twentieth Century. An image of a Hollywood heroine here becomes iconic not just of the vagaries of life and death, but also of ideals and reality, and how society embraces and nurtures this dynamic. The aesthetic and the conceptual are thus inextricably linked, revealing Warhol’s focus on questions of how and why celebrity matters. Moreover, underpinning the visual and intellectual rewards we garner from Nine Marilyns, the extraordinary technical achievement Warhol made, here perfected in the silkscreen technique, creates an astonishing work that truly broadcasts the essence of an icon.
