Warhol's Marilyn silkscreens are among Pop Art's most famous programmatic works. Silkscreen printing as an artistic medium is just as far removed from the spontaneous gesture of painting as serial production is from an original work that carries the artist's signature. In Warhol's work, however, a motif's poignancy lies precisely in the totality of the images. As in many of his other works, the underlying design principle here is the variation on the same iconographic theme. Having become a commodity of American consumerism, the stars are presented in a way comparable to an industrial mass product. Since she died in 1962, numerous series of Marilyn Monroe pictures have been created, their colorful surfaces emphasizing the actress's glamorous image. As in almost all of his female portraits, they are characterized by lipstick, eye shadow, and a photo-friendly smile that lends them a mask-like character. Following various canvas versions, Warhol created a portfolio of ten silkscreens based on a press photo in 1967, which repeated the same subject, the smiling face of the actress, in ten color variations. In the present sheet, Warhol used five color stencils and emphasized the lips in a bold purple-blue contrasting sharply with the pink background. “For the Marilyn series, Warhol drew on an advertising image from the 1953 film ‘Niagara’ [..] Warhol's image shows the creation of a myth. It shows how the primary purpose of portrait photography, namely to be a true-to-life likeness of a person, is overlaid and distorted by a secondary purpose, which sees something else in this person: the perfect creature, the object of sexual desire, the embodiment of the American dream.
Moreover, it shows –and this is where the myth begins – how this secondary sense, however much it may just be a projection, is anchored in the 'reality' of an existing human being by the realism that photography guarantees as a 'true image.' The Marilyns are fictitious and realistic; they show a being that stands above the people and is one of them.” (Michael Lüthy, in: Andy Warhol. Thirty are better than none, Frankfurt a. Main 1995, pp. 51ff.) [EH]