Warhol, Gold Marilyn Monroe

Art History

1960 - Age of Post-Colonialism

Pop & After

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Warhol, Gold Marilyn Monroe Andy Warhol, Gold Marilyn Monroe, Silkscreen ink, Silkscreen ink on synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 71.25 x 57 in. (211.4 x 144.7 cm), 1962 (MoMA)

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Warhol, Gold Marilyn Monroe

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[piano music]
...the fourth floor of the Museum of Modern Art
and the room devoted to pop art and we're looking at a really great painting.
It's actually a really large painting.
It's not really a painting entirely.
It's called "Gold Marilyn", as in Marilyn Monroe. It's from 1962.
And it's not only that it's big, but it feels expensive because most of the canvas is covered
with this kind of slightly metallic bronzish gold paint.
Marilyn's head sort of floating... in a rectangle in the center.
Too small... I mean, really sort of weirdly isolated within the plane of the gold.
Look at Marilyn's head. First of all, this is interesting because it was from -
if I remember correctly - the last photo session that she vetted and sort of approved
and if you look at it it's actually terribly printed, it's not painted at all.
No, it's a print.
Yeah, from a newspaper. From a photograph from a newspaper that's been blown up,
printed in black and then really garishly overprinted with bad registration,
with these horrible colors that came right out of Dick Tracy comic strips.
This yellow on top of the black for the hair, and the red for the lipstick,
and the green eyeshadow.
Oh, God, this turquoise is just awful, isn't it?
And then really the most glamorously garish - the red of the lips over the black.
This was right after her suicide. So this is very powerful stuff.
So this is almost a memorial. I think it's got religious overtones, I think this is a kind of icon.
I think that the gold is functioning like the gold in a Byzantine painting
and she's replaced the Virgin Mary. She is in our consumer culture,
in our culture of glamor, of fame, which was incredibly important to Warhol,
she is now...
That is our culture, that is who we are.
It is. And that's Warhol's brilliance.
He's not thinking about the history of art so much as what is authentic to now.
In fact, let's go back to the printing issue. Warhol, I think, makes a really interesting assessment,
which is - the painting is no longer an entirely authentic process in 1962.
When we live in a world that is a world of manufacture, of mass production,
then he steps back and he stops painting, he starts making prints which are multiple,
he starts hiring people to make prints for him and he does this in a studio
which he calls The Factory.
This has got to have been upsetting to people who were looking for the craft of painting.
And worse than that, what pop's main issue was - turning the still life, the landscape,
traditional history painting, what was left of it - all of those, in a sense, ancient traditions,
on its head and looking to popular culture.
Painting no longer the Virgin Mary, but a pop icon, is an incredibly powerful,
aggressive statement against Western culture.
It was Lichtenstein who was asked in... I think it was 1961 or '62... what was pop art
and he said: you know, after Abstract Expressionism, we could take an oil-soaked rug,
put it on the wall and somebody would call it a work of art.
We were looking for something that was still despicable.
And he said that the thing that was still really despicable
was popular visual culture, was the stuff of our commercial world.
The low culture...
To me, this opens up a whole issue about identity and the way we assume identity.
This is not Marilyn. In fact, we don't have any access to who she actually is at all.
What we have here is her mask.
[piano music]

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