Lot Essay
By 1960, Andy Warhol had achieved great success in advertising with his highly personal style of drawing. But he yearned for the acceptance of the New York gallery world and began to devote more of his time to painting in order to achieve his goal.
His early paintings of cartoon characters and commercial images of Coke bottles were painted in both an expressive, loose style and in a flatter, cooler hard-edge style. The cartoon images were dropped when Warhol became aware of Roy Lichtenstein's cartoon paintings. As for the commercial images, his great friend and advisor, the avant-garde film maker, Emile de Antonio convinced Warhol to drop the expressionist style and go for the cool, hard edge. Warhol began to experiment with ways to reproduce images in the new style. First, in 1962 he hand painted images taken from print sources such as Campbell Soup Cans or 129 Die in Jet (Plane Crash) taken from a New York Mirror headline. He carefully masked the edges of the images and letters in these paintings, but he was still dissatisfied with what he felt were their "handmade" look. He tried cutting rubber stamps to print such images as S & H stamps or airmail stamps, but the size limitations restricted him too much. When, in June or July of 1962, he discovered that he could have silkscreens made from black-and-white photographs, Warhol had found the medium that he would use exclusively over the next two years.
Warhol's use of silkscreens further infuriated his detractors, who now complained that he not only lacked originality but also produced his pictures mechanically. Yet it was his innovative use of the silkscreen technique on canvas, combined with his startling adaptation of commonplace images, that secured his position as one of the most important artists of his time (D. Bourdon, Andy Warhol, New York 1989, p. 123).
Although Warhol had used images of movie stars such as Troy Donahue in his early paintings, it was his series of portraits of Marilyn Monroe, begun shortly after her death in 1962, which are the most memorable of all his works of the period. Warhol utilized a studio publicity photograph of the actress that portrayed her at the beginning of her rise to fame in the national consciousness, which defined her as a glamorous sex symbol. This is what caught Warhol's immediate attention in addition to the amount of publicity her suicide was receiving in the press. However, Marilyn's troubled life and death by suicide betrayed the surface gloss of glamour and revealed the seamier side of celebrity, something which Warhol was just discovering for himself in his own rapid ascent to fame. Marilyn, as Warhol portrayed her, thus became one of the most powerful icons of the tragic celebrity, whose glamorous life could not protect her from the harsher realities of real life.
The technique used for Shot Red Marilyn created the most striking images of his series of Marilyns. Warhol would hand paint the canvas with colored shapes corresponding to Marilyn's face. "Creating in effect a colored map of her face, he first laid down a yellow patch for hair, blue for shadow, red for lips, flesh tone for face and green for collar...Then, after the paint had dried, he placed the silkscreen over the canvas and squeezed black pigment through the mesh, thereby superimposing the photographic image with the colored ground" (ibid, pp. 124-125).
Shot Red Marilyn was created out of an incident that occurred at Warhol's first Factory on East 47th Street in 1964:
The Factory's clouded reputation as a kind of amoral free zone where anything could happen attained a new peak one autumn day in 1964 when Dorothy Pedber...visited the place...Pedber walked to the front of the Factory, where Warhol had leaned several forty-inch-square Marilyn Monore portraits against the wall, slowly took off a pair of white gloves, reached into her purse, pulled out a pistol, and aimed at the movie star's forehead, shooting a hole through the entire stack. Then she returned the gun to her purse, put on her gloves, and smiled triumphantly in Warhol's direction before departing on the elevator. It was the first time anyone had fired a gun in the Factory, and Andy was visibly upset. But he had the canvases repaired and they subsequently became known as The Shot Marilyns (ibid, p. 190).
His early paintings of cartoon characters and commercial images of Coke bottles were painted in both an expressive, loose style and in a flatter, cooler hard-edge style. The cartoon images were dropped when Warhol became aware of Roy Lichtenstein's cartoon paintings. As for the commercial images, his great friend and advisor, the avant-garde film maker, Emile de Antonio convinced Warhol to drop the expressionist style and go for the cool, hard edge. Warhol began to experiment with ways to reproduce images in the new style. First, in 1962 he hand painted images taken from print sources such as Campbell Soup Cans or 129 Die in Jet (Plane Crash) taken from a New York Mirror headline. He carefully masked the edges of the images and letters in these paintings, but he was still dissatisfied with what he felt were their "handmade" look. He tried cutting rubber stamps to print such images as S & H stamps or airmail stamps, but the size limitations restricted him too much. When, in June or July of 1962, he discovered that he could have silkscreens made from black-and-white photographs, Warhol had found the medium that he would use exclusively over the next two years.
Warhol's use of silkscreens further infuriated his detractors, who now complained that he not only lacked originality but also produced his pictures mechanically. Yet it was his innovative use of the silkscreen technique on canvas, combined with his startling adaptation of commonplace images, that secured his position as one of the most important artists of his time (D. Bourdon, Andy Warhol, New York 1989, p. 123).
Although Warhol had used images of movie stars such as Troy Donahue in his early paintings, it was his series of portraits of Marilyn Monroe, begun shortly after her death in 1962, which are the most memorable of all his works of the period. Warhol utilized a studio publicity photograph of the actress that portrayed her at the beginning of her rise to fame in the national consciousness, which defined her as a glamorous sex symbol. This is what caught Warhol's immediate attention in addition to the amount of publicity her suicide was receiving in the press. However, Marilyn's troubled life and death by suicide betrayed the surface gloss of glamour and revealed the seamier side of celebrity, something which Warhol was just discovering for himself in his own rapid ascent to fame. Marilyn, as Warhol portrayed her, thus became one of the most powerful icons of the tragic celebrity, whose glamorous life could not protect her from the harsher realities of real life.
The technique used for Shot Red Marilyn created the most striking images of his series of Marilyns. Warhol would hand paint the canvas with colored shapes corresponding to Marilyn's face. "Creating in effect a colored map of her face, he first laid down a yellow patch for hair, blue for shadow, red for lips, flesh tone for face and green for collar...Then, after the paint had dried, he placed the silkscreen over the canvas and squeezed black pigment through the mesh, thereby superimposing the photographic image with the colored ground" (ibid, pp. 124-125).
Shot Red Marilyn was created out of an incident that occurred at Warhol's first Factory on East 47th Street in 1964:
The Factory's clouded reputation as a kind of amoral free zone where anything could happen attained a new peak one autumn day in 1964 when Dorothy Pedber...visited the place...Pedber walked to the front of the Factory, where Warhol had leaned several forty-inch-square Marilyn Monore portraits against the wall, slowly took off a pair of white gloves, reached into her purse, pulled out a pistol, and aimed at the movie star's forehead, shooting a hole through the entire stack. Then she returned the gun to her purse, put on her gloves, and smiled triumphantly in Warhol's direction before departing on the elevator. It was the first time anyone had fired a gun in the Factory, and Andy was visibly upset. But he had the canvases repaired and they subsequently became known as The Shot Marilyns (ibid, p. 190).