Andy Warhol

Waddington Galleries, Ltd., London
Hiro Chikashige Gallery, Okayama, acquired in 1989
Private Collection, Hiroshima
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2005

London, Waddington Galleries, Andy Warhol: Reversal Series, 1987, p. 15, no. 6, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals very small areas of extremely faint frame rubbing to the extreme top right and bottom right corners. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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"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

 

Marilyn (Reversal Series) is archetypal of Andy Warhol's critically acclaimed Reversals series that was such an important focus of his later career. Signalling a new period of productivity in the artist's work, the Reversals alongside the contemporaneous Retrospectives introduced a new conceptual vigour to Warhol's artistic practice. Taking his cue from the tradition of artists who have adapted, varied and transformed the art of their predecessors, Warhol, in an act of post-modernist brilliance, expropriated material from his own now infamous repertoire of images, transforming his classic Pop iconography with surprising painterly techniques and compositional reconfigurations.

 

Marilyn (Reversal Series) is an outstanding example of Warhol's now-perfected silkscreen process, perfectly communicating this powerfully post-modern corpus that pivots on the Duchampian notion of the readymade. Warhol had already appropriated images from Fine Art once before, in his 1963 serial painting depicting Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, provocatively re-titled Thirty are Better than One. Warhol's interest in Leonardo's masterpiece, however, was less about its art historical significance and more to do with its celebrity status. Exceptionally released from the safekeeping of the Louvre for a brief visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art that year, the press furore surrounding the visit of this normally immovable painting drew hoards of people curious to experience its alluring enigma. Little more than fifteen years later, Warhol's own paintings and celebrity status were so aggrandised that his instantly recognisable images of Marilyn Monroe befitted the same treatment as the Mona Lisa.

 

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) In Marilyn Monroe, whom he painted shortly after her premature death in 1962 at the height of her celebrity, Warhol found a memento 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. The vibrant colour of this Marilyn recalls the vibrant and shocking palette of Warhol's earlier Marilyns, in which he had deliberately chosen lurid, conflicting hues to transcend the humanity of the recently deceased star. Through negative printing, however, Warhol achieves a ghostly dematerialisation of his subject, with the shadowy face now reduced to an inverted cipher of the legendary visage: an after-image memorial. Although still recognisable and legible thanks to its common currency, Warhol's manipulations neutralise the power of the original image to convey meaning so that here the emphasis is less on the celebrity of the sitter and more on that of the artist himself, less a depiction of the star and more a reflection on Warhol's own artistic past.

 

In an ironic nod in the direction of his Abstract Expressionist antecedents, Warhol began Marilyn (Reversal Series) by broadly brushing skeins of paint onto a length of canvas to create a surprisingly varied and gestural ground anathema to the insistently flat surfaces of his 1960s canvases. However, this lushly drippy surface in which we feel the physical presence of the artist is subversively negated and drained of meaning by the uncompromisingly flat inky black of the superimposed silkscreen. While in the earlier Marilyns the coloured grounds corresponded to the silk-screened images with different coloured zones being demarcated for the face, in the present series the relationship between the printed and hand-painted elements is more arbitrary, a sardonic indictment of the expressive potential of the brushstroke.

 

Having reanalysed his own pictorial inventions in the Reversals series, Warhol devoted much of his 1980s creative practice to exploring the artistic methods of his predecessors. In a broad range of compositions, Warhol directly lifted imagery from artists as varied as Cranach, Ucello, Munch and de Chirico, subjecting each to his levelling silkscreen technique which both alienates and transforms the image into a quintessential Warhol. The present work stands at the pinnacle of Warhol's appropriation based paintings and is important not only because it questions the notions of authorship, authenticity and originality in art but also the because it probes the legitimacy of Warhol's own artistic code.