Interviewer: "Andy, do you feel that the public has insulted your art?"
Andy: "Err no"
"Why not?" - "Err, well i hadn't thought about it" "It doesn't bother you at all then?" - "Err no"
"Well, do you think that they've shown a lack of appreciation for what Pop Art means?" - "Err no"
"Andy, do you think that Pop Art has sort of reached the point where it's becoming repetitious now?" - "Err, yes"
"The late Marilyn Monroe"
Andy Warhol made "Marilyn Diptych" in 1962, right after Marilyn Monroe's death.
By the 1960's Marilyn's film career as a sex symbol was all but over. Warhol would effectively immortalise
Marilyn as THE sex symbol of the 20th century. The seductive blonde Marilyn with the heavy-lidded eyes,
and parted lips, is frozen in time. She is transformed into the personification of
the allure and glamour of Hollywood's Golden Age. Both Warhol and Marilyn understood transformation.
She was an abused foster child from the rural midwest, who transformed herself
into Hollywood royalty. And he was a shy, sickly, effeminate child of working class immigrants,
who transformed himself into the most famous and most controversial artist of his generation.
Marilyn would make Warhol a household name, and Warhol would make Marilyn an icon.
Pop Art came out of the post-war consumer boom - a time of mass media and mass production.
Advertising pushed televisions, new cars ,washing machines, and convenience foods. People were bombarded with image
after image, and art needed to reflect that. Pop art was inspired by popular culture and artists like
Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol used instantly accessible images to reach mass audiences.
Their art would blur the boundaries of "High Art" and "Low Culture". It was in many ways a reaction against
Abstract Expressionism, the dominant artistic movement in the United States in the 1950s.
While Abstract Impressionists like Jackson Pollock produced spontaneous personal and emotional work,
Pop artists were producing depersonalised, objectified, and representational work.
Warhol had already produced two, of what would become, iconic Pop artworks but "Marilyn Diptych"
he produced just four months after her death, would cement his reputation as "The Prince of Pop art".
Warhol was an early adopter of the silkscreen printmaking process.
He totally radicalized the art market by erasing a concept so important to Western Art:
"Uniqueness" and "Originality". While Warhol didn't invent the photographic silkscreen process,
he developed his own technique, by combining hand-painted backgrounds with photographic
silk screen printed images. To create unique works of art.
As an illustrator in the 1950s, Warhol had already started to work with repetition,
and a forerunner to printing. His "blotted line technique" which became his signature style.
He would use tracing paper to allow him to create multiple images from the same drawing.
He would first trace his original drawing with ink in small sections so it stayed wet, then blot it
onto absorbent paper, making a copy. Then he would fill in various copies using ink washes.
Silk screens are photographically exposed to the image, to make a stencil - then artists
transfer their artworks by pushing ink through the mesh using a squeegee, onto various surfaces,
including paper and fabric. One colour is printed at a time, so several screens must
be used to produce a multi-coloured image. It gives the artist the opportunity to repeatedly reproduce
the same image. "Marilyn Diptych" is made up of two canvases painted silver. He then silk screens
a photograph of Marilyn 50 times. The images on the left have five colors of under paint:
Pink - White - Blue and Orange. All unified on both sides with a final layer of black. We must remember
that it would have been easy enough for Warhol to make a crisp clean image, but the bleeding
of the ink, the overlapping colours, and the ghostly grey images are deliberate choices.
Andy Warhol loved celebrities and was infatuated with movie stars. He grew up poverty stricken in
Pittsburgh during the depression. Obsessed with fame and celebrity at an early age,
he would escape by devouring movie magazines, and writing fan letters to movie stars.
At 13, he wrote to Shirley Temple and received this signed photo - later found in his childhood scrapbook.
The pose and the colour tinting of the photo, may well have influenced his images of Marilyn.
Later in the mid-1950s when he was a well-known shoe illustrator, he would name his shoes after celebrities.
But instead of choosing an image from 1962, the year she died, he chose a publicity still
from ten years before. By using THIS image, he portrayed Marilyn at the peak of her beauty
and her youth - and the peak of her fame. Marilyn is forever frozen in perfect cinematic beauty.
Warhol always thought he was ugly. His insecurities were rooted in his sickly childhood and exacerbated
by premature baldness, pockmarked skin, prominent nose and later, scarring from gunshot wounds.
His art examined what constituted beauty. Marilyn diptych is not an "idealised beauty"
or perfect image. Her face doesn't quite match to the gaudy colour behind it. He is questioning
the idea of perfection. Warhol understood the superficial nature of beauty and celebrity.
Publicity images like these are created by marketing companies to sell a product - a film.
But in reality, say little about the person behind the image.
The silk screen technique has the effect of flattening her face, both figuratively and emotionally.
Marilyn Monroe, a manufactured star with a made-up name. is reduced to a vacant facade
And the artist is a machine churning out manufactured images. like a hollywood film studio.
The repetition of the image, suggests billboard posters or advertising or more appropriately a photographer's contact sheet.
Repeating Marilyn, turns her face into an eerie inanimate death mask and if one image is powerful
then 50 dead marilyn's are 50 times more powerful.
Kennedy: "Missiles in Cuba add to an already clear and present danger"
In 1962, when Warhol was painting Marilyn, tensions were rising between the US and the Soviet Union,
and the Cuban missile crisis would feed into warhol's obsession with death.
Death was a subject that would haunt and fascinate him all his life, from his father's premature death,
his own poor health as a child, his shooting in 1968 - to the AIDs epidemic
At the same time he painted Marilyn, he was also starting a series of works called "The Death and Disaster series".
This is a group of around 70 loosely connected works, that included images taken from newspapers
and police reports, depicting car accidents, electric chairs, suicides and plane crashes.
His paintings of Marilyn Monroe ,shortly after her death and Jackie Kennedy, following the
assassination of President John F Kennedy, can be seen in relation to this series.
Marilyn's death hangs over this image. On the left, her garishly made up face makes us think of an embalmed corpse.
While the fading images on the right, make it seem like she is disappearing before our eyes,
suggesting her death by suicide. The painting is not actually "celebrating" Monroe as an icon,
but is rather a warning of the fatal consequences of fame.
News: "Warhol - guru of pop art has died in New York
Andy Warhol shocked society more than any other artist. But he saved his greatest shock for after his death
When he died, it was revealed that, despite being a symbol of American counter-culture,
Warhol was in fact a devout but closeted Byzantine Catholic,
who went to church to pray most days, and kept an altar with a crucifix and a prayer book
on his bedside table. Not only was a supposedly cynical business-artist, a devout Catholic
but he secretly worked in New York soup kitchens. He spent most of his life living with his mother Julia.
A Slovakian immigrant, who spoke little English and was also a devout Catholic.
A church-going mother's boy, did not really fit the studio 54 party-goer image he cultivated
His father died prematurely, but Julia was possibly the greatest influence in his life.
She had decorated his childhood home with her own folk art and homemade religious icons.
She not only encouraged his religious side as a child but she also pushed his artistic side.
Despite being so poor, she bought him his first camera at nine years old,
and bought him regular art supplies.
Later, she moved with him to New York, cleaned his apartment, cooked for him and prayed with him every
morning before he left the house. Along with dreams of movie stars, the young Andy Warhola's
only other escape from poverty, was the church. It would lead to Warhol's two childhood passions -
religion and celebrity - being fused together for his first Marilyn, who he would depict as an icon,
and an object of worship. Like the Catholic cult of the Virgin Mary, women haunted his art.
He idolised women, who appear as remote superhuman beauties, martyrs even.
Judy Garland, Jackie Kennedy, Grace Kelly, Edie Sedgwick and others were transformed into deities.
His friend, Bob Colicello, would describe Warhol as "A religious artist for a secular society".
As a child he attended mass at their church, where they would conduct the service in
old Slavonic and always started with an exorcism of the Devil. It is here, where he would spend hours
in front of the monumental "iconostasis," which is a wall that separated the nave from the sanctuary.
It was essentially, a grid of portraits of the saints. The young Warhol would contemplate the
isolated figures of saints, floating on gilded gold, stacked repeatedly across the screen.
It was HERE, that his visual language was formed. The highly stylised Byzantine icons,
were a huge influence on Warhol. There is the block colours and the flatness, the lack of depth,
but there is also the actual method of manufacture. Icons were often made using stencils, echoing
Warhol's future screen printing process. Mass icon production, meant they were also made by a team of
anonymous artists, something he would later mimic with his assembly line method of production.
He often expressed the desire to be "like a machine" and icon painters were considered "machines of God".
"The Marilyn Diptych" explicitly references a form of Christian painting -
A diptych is usually a small portable altarpiece on two hinged wooden panels.
Used to spread Christianity to the illiterate masses. With his background in advertising,
Warhol understood visuals. "I never read" he once said "I just look at pictures".
It is no surprise then, that a contemporary artist raised in the Catholic slavic ghettos of Pittsburgh,
would use familiar religious symbolism and apply it to Celebrity - America's newest "faith".
From early on in his career, Andy Warhol had an extraordinary ability of finding the sacred in the profane.
Like so many successful Americans, he was a product of the Eastern European immigrant experience, who himself became an icon.
A shy, gay, working-class man, who became the court painter of the 1970s.
An artist who embraced consumerism, celebrity, and the counter culture, and changed
modern art in the process. He anticipated our fascination with brands, celebrities, even selfies.
His line about "everyone being famous for 15 minutes" feels even more true in the 21st century.
Above all, Warhol was a chronicler of modern life. "Marilyn Diptych" is perhaps his greatest canvas,
bringing together celebrity, death and exposure. It is both a warning AND a love letter to America.
Warhol, who is often criticised as "vacuous" or "superficial" produced art, that is profoundly
subversive and quite simply a perfect mirror for our times. Andy Warhol and Marilyn Monroe were both
the embodiment of "the American dream", they also projected a vacant persona that made sure nobody
knew the real person behind the mask. What we do know is that Warhol had the very rare ability to
share what he saw, with all of us. He redefined art: What art can be. What art can mean. Who has access to art.
Who can make art. And whose voice matters.
He democratised the very notion of art making.