Marilyn's paintings,
created between 1963 and 1967, renew an advertising photo of the movie
"Niagara"; they were realized by using the screen-printing, which
allows to print a subject in a repetitive way. Andy Warhol, in love with Marilyn
Monroe and at the same time fascinated by her death, began this series a little
time after the death of the actress.
The Pop art
marks, from the end of the 50s, a reaction to the abstract expressionism which
dominates the American art. This movement give a new look to the sector of production
neglected up to here by the avant-gardes: the BD, the ads, the newspapers, the
cinema, the industrial products of mass and their processes of reproduction
will be the privileged objects of their investigation.
In this
series of portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol wanted to prove that we
could make of art a consumer product common and disposable. While a portrait is
intended to be unique, getting the precise features of a face, the character,
the depth of the look, Marilyn Monroe of Warhol became a product without
detail, an empty shape, a "pure" image, reproduced infinitely. With
the work on the color, the face seems veiled, subdued.
By the
assembly of these portraits, alternately colorful, sink or saturating, going as
far as removing partially the features of the face, the artist reveals the death
of the image in parallel with the death of the celebrity. By representing serial
faces of Marilyn Monroe, aligned as bottles of Coca-Cola in a hypermarket,
Warhol indicates that the face is only the refraction of the anonymous desire
of a multitude. This theme of the depersonalization of the contemporary societies
of mass is very present in its work.
