NINE MARILYNS AND SIXTEEN JACKIES

W hen looking at Andy Warhol’s early silkscreen works it is always somewhat jarring and counterintuitive to realize that his career long obsession with celebrity was intimately entwined with a fascination with death and disaster. As legend has it, early in the summer of 1962 Warhol’s friend Henry Geldzahler, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, came into his studio and encouraged the artist to look at the darker side of the American dream. “That’s enough affirmation of life. It’s enough affirmation of soup and Coke bottles. Maybe everything isn’t always so fabulous in America. It’s time for some death. This is what’s really happening.” (1) Geldzahler then handed Warhol a copy of the New York Daily News with a tabloid-scaled headline screaming “129 DIE IN JET” and Warhol dutifully painted this image by hand in his first foray into what would later evolve into his disaster series. Warhol painted 129 DIE IN JET (1962) in June just before he discovered the silkscreen process that would radically transform his painting practice for the rest of his career. (2) Although Warhol’s first silk-screened paintings of celebrities in August of 1962 were devoted to the young Hollywood teen stars Natalie Wood, Warren Beatty, and Troy Donahue, none of these works held the same level of pathos that would soon infuse Warhol’s work. It wasn’t until he turned to the image of Marilyn Monroe that the connection between celebrity and disaster would come to its mature realization. As the legendary MoMA curator Kynaston McShine pointed out, “It was when the Disasters’ theme of death coincided with his fascination with stardom and beauty that Warhol found the subjects of his best-known groups of celebrity portraits: Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and Jacqueline Kennedy.” (3)

Just after he had completed 129 Die in Jet Warhol turned his attention to the beatification of his very own Madonna in the form of the silk-screened visage of Marilyn Monroe that he appropriated from a now iconic eight-by-ten-inch glossy black-and-white publicity head shot of the Hollywood star taken by Gene Korman for the 1953 film Niagra. Warhol began producing these images of Monroe just after her suicide on August 5, 1962, which was incidentally the same day that his infamous exhibition of Campbell’s Soup Cans at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles closed. Monroe’s death had occurred at precisely the moment that Warhol had begun experimenting with the silkscreen process in his painting practice. In an interview with Gene Swenson in Art News in November 1963, Warhol himself linked the images of Monroe to the theme of death: “I guess it was the big plane crash picture, the front page of a newspaper; 129 DIE. I was also painting the Marilyns. I realized that everything I was doing must have been Death. It was Christmas or Labor Day—a holiday—and every time you turned on the radio they said something like ‘4 million are going to die.’ That started it. But when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn’t really have any effect.”(4)

As he perhaps sensed something of the power of the silvery tain of the narcissistic Hollywood mirror, Monroe’s death fascinated Warhol. His fixation on this single image of her resulted in a large body of work, with more than fifty paintings executed between August 1962 and 1964 as well as a portfolio of ten prints produced in 1967. As he worked with both single and serial images of the actress, Warhol’s use of the silk-screen process would allow difference and repetition to become the reigning logic of his work. One of the first of these paintings, Gold Marilyn (1962), was something of an outlier as it depicts a single-colored silk-screened portrait of Monroe floating on a rectangular gold background that evokes Byzantine religious icon paintings. Something about this work feels as if it has one foot firmly rooted in the past, as if Monroe were being cast as Joan of Arc. It wasn’t until Warhol began screening serial images of Marilyn (in multiples of two, three, four, six, nine, twenty, twenty-five, fifty, one hundred) that the connection between stardom and the dark, cannibalistic impulses of a burgeoning media culture would reveal itself.

Among the most monumental and iconic of the serial Marilyns is Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych (1962) which is now in Tate Modern’s collection. Composed of two large panels—each with twenty-five silk-screen repetitions of the actress rendered in either oversaturated colors (orange, turquoise, red, black, and yellow) or in black and white—this painting constitutes a radical break in Warhol’s practice as her repeated image shifts from garish color to complete obliteration and then a long, slow fade-out. Difference in repetition is the key to this work as the screen for the black-and-white panel gets clogged and entire rows of her likeness begin to stutter and fade to black as if a piece of celluloid had gotten stuck in a projector and the lamp had begun to burn the film. This is an apt metaphor for an image of an actress who would become the prototype of the tragic Hollywood celebrity flameout. Writing about this painting in 2009, Arthur Danto likened it to a reenactment of Monroe’s death: “It is like a graphic representation of Marilyn dying, without the smile leaving her face. In this respect the fifty faces of Marilyn Monroe are very different from the array of thirty-two Campbell’s Soup Cans, which are uniformly bright. There is no internal transformation. In Marilyn Diptych there is repetition, but it is a transformative repetition, in which the accidentalities of the silk-screen medium are allowed to remain like the honks and squawks of a saxophone solo, in performances by John Coltrane.” (5)

The transformative slippages of what Danto refers to as Warhol’s Coltrane-esque silk-screen process can also be seen in Nine Marilyns (1962) which holds a unique place within this series. Composed of nine black-and-white silkscreened images of the actress’s face arranged in a block of three-by-three, the dimensions of this work place it firmly within the family of the larger serial Marilyns such as Marilyn Diptych, 100 Marilyns (1962) and Marilyn Monroe in Black and White (Twenty-Five Marilyns) (1962), as the height of the canvas approximates the stature of those other epic works. As there is roughly twice as much empty space below the Marilyns as there is above, and the chiaroscuro array of her likenesses bleeds off of the vertical edges of the canvas, this work gives the impression of an ascension of the film goddess’s avatar into another realm. Indeed, perhaps more than any of the other multiple Marilyns, Nine Marilyns resembles a film screen with its central image projected in sharp focus while the other eight repeated images surround it in a stuttering approximation of the Korman’s original image of Marilyn with their silk-screen registrations exuding various states of intensity and ephemerality as they move from a dark and somber over-inking to nearly ghostly imprints that suggest reliquaries like the Shroud of Turin. The other important thing about this work is that it was executed in black-and-white. (6) Drained of the garish colors of his other Marilyns, Warhol’s Nine Marilyns becomes a monochromatic pop art answer to the challenge of all over painting posed by the Abstract Expressionist generation who preceded Warhol and whom he admired. Here the absence of color allows Warhol to produce a monochromatic answer to an artist like Rothko as the repetition of Monroe’s image begins to cancel out its actual content while instead suggesting another kind of secular contemplation in which the iconicity of a pop star is transferred into a far more transcendental register.

At the heart of Warhol’s serial Marilyns there is an acknowledgement of a culture in which adoration results in a kind of consumption. Nine Marilyns is a perfect example of this proposition. We devour and discard the icons that we love through a media environment that acts as a Moloch, the pagan god of child sacrifice. Indeed, when it comes to Hollywood, eating our young is what makes the cameras roll. We are all cannibals. In the mistakes, cancellations, mis-registrations, and compulsive repetitions of Warhol’s silk-screened surfaces, however, one can also see a kind of resistance to these rapacious forces of darkness. There is paradoxically a kind of humanizing of Monroe in works such as Nine Marilyns, as if the shifted register of the silk-screen alignment and the staggered intensity of the pass of the squeegee over Warhol’s canvas allowed a gap to appear in the tightly maintained public persona of this textbook case of a star devoured by fame. In this instance, the nine repetitions of this image of Marilyn lifts a veil and allow a bit of light to escape the gravitational force of the black hole that is the media and celebrity culture.

The Marilyn paintings took Warhol through a glass darkly, but the actress had company. The irresistible glow of tragedy and glamour would play itself out equally in Warhol’s fascination with the lonely figure of Jacqueline Kennedy, the chaste and elegant counterpart to the Aphroditean figure of Monroe (as well as that of Elizabeth Taylor with whom he was similarly intrigued at that time). In serial works such as Sixteen Jackies (1964), Warhol demonstrated his near obsession with press images of the fallen president’s widow just after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963. In more than three hundred paintings, Warhol moved from single panels to multiple images of the widowed First Lady, juxtaposing the happy pre-assassination Jackie with the mourning Jackie. Jackie smiling, Jackie veiled, Jackie looking down or off into the distance. While there are a number of iterations of the Jackie paintings in multiples of sixteen, including one in the collection of the Walker Art Center, this particular example provides a particularly vertiginous arrangement of six different images of Jackie before and after the assassination. Composed of sixteen small individual canvases that were eventually gathered together into one composition, Warhol plays with a crisscrossing intersection of gazes cast by its subject that push the viewer’s eye up and down, left and right, in a checkboard blue, black and white vortex of mourning.7 The lower left-hand corner of the painting is anchored by three of the five examples of the smiling Jackie looking to the left with President Kennedy by her side on the morning before the tragedy. The upper right corner of the painting provides the antipode to this happy Jackie in two of the three examples in this work of images of the First Lady at her husband’s funeral looking to her right accompanied by a military escort. The rather dizzying set of visual vectors created by Warhol’s juxtaposition of these sixteen images suggests a new kind of history painting for the age of mechanical reproduction in which six different frozen photographic moments of one woman’s life came to take on the contours of the failed hopes and dreams of an entire nation. As with all of Warhol’s silkscreened stars that he produced at this moment (including Marilyn, Jackie and Elizabeth Taylor), Sixteen Jackies attests to the fragility of the constructed personas of these public figures while his compulsive repetition of the same images over and over again speaks to both the voracious mechanism driving the media and Warhol’s either obliviously or cagily pointed revelation of the structure and power of these mechanisms. Regardless of his intent, Warhol’s strategy of appropriation and repetition in this and the hundreds of other Jackie works positioned Warhol as a dark oracle heralding the conclusion of a hope-filled age of youthful exuberance that would come to define the “Camelot” image of the Kennedy presidency. Although Abraham Zapruder’s 8mm film of the Kennedy assassination would not be broadcast on television until the 1970s (when it stirred considerable controversy), the intense media coverage of the assassination and its aftermath would become a precursor to the compulsive repetition of today’s twenty-four- hour news cycle. In the wake of these events Jackie herself would become the unwitting star of a film documenting the slow beginning of the end of an era of American exceptionalism.

Warhol’s invocation of fallen heroes and tragic muses would make his silk-screen process take on the role of an oracle or a soothsayer. In his multiple repetitions of the then recently deceased Marilyn Monroe or the endless permutations and combinations of his Jackies he changed the register of what might be considered history painting while imbuing his subjects with a sympathetic quality that belied their Olympian cultural status. Whether in nine iterations of Marilyn or sixteen examples of Jackie, we are confronted with Warhol’s painterly calculus of American tragedy. When seen in concert with his contemporaneous silk-screened “disasters” – the anonymous, frequent, and all too ordinary suicides, car crashes, and other tragedies culled from the relentless flow of images in newspapers and magazines that the critic Peter Schjeldahl once referred to as “images of plebeian catastrophe” – we get a clearer picture of Warhol’s fascination with his tragic celebrity muses. (8) Whether famous for fifteen minutes or for centuries, the mechanism of the tragic denouement is the same. Death welcomes a kind of democratic levelling ­on the surfaces of Warhol’s canvases while history becomes a painterly operatic mechanism that stutters with the halting mis-registrations and the differing degrees of intensity of the compulsive repetitions of a few silkscreened images. This was the radicality of Warhol’s serendipitous marriage between his new method of creating paintings and his subjects whose images were themselves formed and disseminated through the same principles of repetition and mechanical reproduction. Marilyn and Jackie were as much media created icons floating in the ether of popular culture as they were flesh and blood women. In a truly Duchampian gesture, Warhol critically saw through this veneer while also acknowledging the seductive power of the image itself.

[1] Henry Geldzahler quoted in Victor Bockris, Warhol: The Biography (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2003), 169.

[2] Referring to the issue of the Daily News that was the basis for his painting 129 Die in Jet, Warhol wrote, “Whenever I look back at that front page, I’m struck by the date—June 4, 1962. Six years—to the date—later, my own disaster was the front-page headline: Artist Shot.” Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol ’60s (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 21.

[3] Kynaston McShine, introduction to Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, ed. Kynaston McShine (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), 17. This catalogue accompanied Warhol’s first posthumous retrospective, which McShine curated.

[4] Warhol, quoted in G. R. Swenson, “What Is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters, Part 1,” Art News 62 (November 1963), 60.

[A] Arthur Danto, Andy Warhol (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 41.

[6] Warhol made a number of black-and-white iterations of his Marilyns including the right-side panel of Marilyn Diptych (which was originally executed as a unique work before the collector Emily Tremaine suggested combing them), the right side of the canvas 100 Marilyns which is now in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the entirety of Marilyn Monroe in Black and White (Twenty Five Marilyns) which is the collection of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, in addition to Nine Marilyns and a number of smaller works including Marilyn Six Pack and black-and-white iterations of the serial Marilyns that include two or three images of the film icon.

[7] Originally purchased by David Pincus from Leo Castelli Gallery in 1965 as a set of twenty-four panels, this work was prominently featured in that form in Warhol’s legendary exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia from October to November of 1965. Twenty of its panels were then shown in the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s exhibition Silkscreen: A History of the Medium from December 1971 to February 1972 before it subsequently found its final iteration in the sixteen-panel version that is now known as Sixteen Jackies.

[8] Peter Schjeldahl, “Warhol and Class Content,” Art in America 68 (May 1980), 118.