Everyone recognizes Marilyn.
Some of you recognize the source of the image – a still from her movie, Niagara, 1953.
Andy Warhol (1929-1987) produced this silkscreen print of Marilyn two weeks after her tragic death, a drug overdose, on August 5, 1962. She was 36 years old.
Marilyn was a sex goddess, a symbol of beauty, desire and fame.
She has been immortalized in a thousand ways, but it is Warhol who understands her: a child of foster homes, broken marriages, abusive and demanding directors – walking the tightrope of fame and falling off.
Like Warhol, she is mythical.
Warhol made her an icon.
Look closely, again.
What do you see?
Who do you see?
Are these bedroom eyes, seductive eyes?
Or tired eyes, drugged eyes?
Vacant?
What about her mouth?
Frozen, kissable? Breathing?
And her day glow hair?
Flattering?
Embarrassing?
Revealing?
Haunting?
So why do you think that Warhol presented her this way?
The portrait is actually 1/25th from the left side of the large silkscreen print, Marilyn Diptych. The diptych is 88’x114, acrylic paint on canvas, of 50 images, 25 in color, 25 in black and white. It is in the collection of The Tate Modern in London.
When you look at the left side of the diptych, you see that the 25 heads of Marilyn, float bodiless. Her role has reversed. We know her from film, animated and emotional, and here she is still and passive. This is unexpected.
Seen as a group, there is no one image to get close to.
But if you look closely, you can see slight variations in color and value and certainly in registration. There is tension in the slippage.
When you consider the right side, you see an inconsistency in the images, the second panel is almost inked out, blurred, obliterated. As you move further right the images of Marilyn struggle, fade and disappear.
Could these two panels represent the living Marilyn and the dead Marilyn?
The process: Warhol has silkscreened (silk mesh stretched on a frame) an enlarged black and white image of Marilyn, from a newspaper photograph, on the two canvases in 5 rows of 5. This is his “drawing”.
He blocks out what he wants to reserve for color with glue and he pulls black ink across the remaining image with a squeegee. The glued/protected areas resist the ink. So he has a black image, like in the right side, on the left side.
The registration is not precise, intentionally.
Warhol then paints each image on the left side with bright acrylic paint, very slightly varying in the color. Sometimes he is within the image perfectly, sometimes not.
This gives a slight vibration to the left panel. Then he repeats the screening process so that the black is on top, adding more definition.
Overall, the images of Marilyn are numbing.
Her humanity is gone.
The repetition of her image dulls and dehumanizes her as she becomes a pattern.
A page of postal stamps.
There is a machine-like, mass produced, assembly line quality to the work. Silkscreen printing eliminates the personal, the “signature”, the way that we recognize an artist’s style. Warhol is evident only in the choice of color.
Intentional.
This icon of Hollywood beauty (and the White House) is no longer an individual, but a Pop icon. Her presence and delicate beauty are gone.
She reads like a filmstrip.
Tragic.
And that brings us to “Pop Art”, basically a 60’s movement that redefined American art, but actually birthed in London (1957) where artists were attracted to advertisements from America and to the mass production of American products that was not happening yet in England.
The focus of Pop Art was on popular culture: iconic film stars, Coca-Cola bottles, funny paper strips, soft toilets, flags, hot dogs and hamburgers, toothpaste, vacuum cleaners, phone booths, and emblems of American obsession and bad taste, and bright, flat billboard colors.
Pop Art followed Abstract Expressionism chronologically but is the antithesis of the emotional and gestural wreckage of the heroes of action painting. Instead, most Pop Art works were painted flatly or printed, often humorous, whimsical, absurd, frightening, and repetitious.
In Pop Art, the imagery matters more than the elements. It saw tremendous possibilities in the everyday. Pop Art parallels the Kennedy administration where art and glamour were at the forefront. By 1965, Pop Art had become the most popular movement in American art history.
Andy Warhol was the most famous and the most outrageous artist of the Pop period. His childhood was in a Czechoslovakian (Warhola) working class neighborhood in Pittsburgh during the depression. His family recognized his talent. He graduated in design from the Carnegie Institute of Technology. His early career in New York was as a commercial illustrator for Glamour, Vogue, and The New Yorker among others, and a window decorator for I. Miller and Sons. As his artistic independence grew, he not only painted but established himself as an elusive and mythical gay man who created and directed 600 films, many underground, frequented the then famous nightclub, Studio 54 clothed in furs and surrounded by an entourage, produced video installations and performance art pieces, was a social climber who was preoccupied with celebrity and death, a cult leader, and a businessman, establishing a production studio with numerous assistants in Chelsea called The Factory.
In 1968 he was almost killed by a rejected starlet, Valerie Solanis, with three gunshots to his chest hitting most major organs but not his heart. Alice Neel did a portrait of him, waist up, showing the multiple scars on his chest. After 19 more years of fame, he died of complications from a routine gall bladder surgery in New York Hospital, age 58 in 1987.
He was a CELEBRITY,also. And his entourage, his followers, including his collectors and his artist-friends, also became celebrities.
So, how do YOU become a celebrity?
It’s easy. Money helps.
You hang out with up and coming young artists, you build friendships, and you meet their friends (other artists). You get invited to their parties. You contribute something – wine or something else. You buy their work – cheap.
This is what Robert Scull did.
And by the time that his collection was auctioned………..Oh WOW!
Robert Scull (1915-1986) said that his joy was in becoming involved in the lives of the artists and that he never bought a painting because of its value. He picked what he liked.
This was before the artists had a reputation. Then value started to matter.
Scull was a child of Russian/Jewish immigrants, living in the lower east side of Manhattan. He was a freelance illustrator who met Ethel Redner at Parsons School of Art. As a wedding gift, Ethel’s father gave them 1/3 of the family taxi fleet business. Robert turned these 130 cabs and 400 drivers into “Scull’s Angels.” Perhaps you have hailed one.
And he started buying art: Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art and later 60’s abstraction.
He and Ethel became icons in the New York social scene.
Robert is quoted: “I’d rather use art to climb then anything else.”
Art and society married.
Celebrities.
In 1973 Robert auctioned 50 paintings from his collection.
There was worldwide advertisement and competitive bids. In one hour, the collection, purchased for $150,000 a decade before, sold for 2.2 million at Manhattan’s Sotheby Parke Bernet. Taxi drivers protested that the Sculls had moved upward over their hard-driving backs. And, when a painting of Robert Rauschenberg’s, purchased in 1959 for $2,500, sold for $90,000, with no compensation (royalty) to the artist, there was outrage and protest in the art community.
The disparity in the purchase price and the selling price (resale) raises a question: Should artists receive royalties when their work is resold for a large profit?
The sales at this auction started protests and debates.
Think about this.
And unfortunately, nothing has changed regarding royalties.
But this one auction changed the art market, particularly regarding modern art.
Art became a marketable and bankable commodity.
Fair or not.
Usually Warhol worked from public photographs – those of Marilyn, Jackie, Liz, car crashes and electric chairs. But for Ethel (“Spike”) he used candid snapshots, polaroids.
And Ethel is immortalized in Warhol’s Ethel Scull 36Ttimes, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A celebrity, along with Marilyn and Warhol.
So, BUY ART. You can now buy NFT works and artists DO get royalties.