Liz

Warhol's celebrity portraits depict figures with larger-than-life personal myths who had achieved the level of stardom that the artist so coveted. He found his perfect subject in the three women he painted obsessively during the mid-1960s. As Warhol has acknowledged, his decision to portray Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Elizabeth Taylor highlighted their beauty and fame but involved a macabre twist. As the artist admitted to Gene Swenson in 1963: "I realized that everything I was doing must have been [about] death" (Quoted in After the Party: Andy Warhol Works 1956-1986, exh. cat., Dublin and London, 1997, p. 69). Such themes are undoubtedly more apparent in his Death and Disaster series, but contemporary critics often followed Warhol's suggestion, as one wrote of Liz: "She is a thing of our day, and whether we like her or wish for the old National Velvet girl, we cannot escape her, as we cannot escape soup or death" (P. Bergin, "Andy Warhol: The Artist as Machine," Art Journal, Summer 1967, p. 362).

Created at approximately the same time as his depictions of electric chairs and car crashes, Warhol's full-face images of Marilyn, Jackie, and Liz followed on the heels of deaths and disasters in all three of his subjects' lives: Taylor's catastrophic illness in 1961, Monroe's suicide in August 1962, and John F. Kennedy's assassination in November 1963. Warhol's early images of Taylor were directly tied to the collapse that interrupted the filming of Cleopatra, referenced in both Daily News and Blue Liz as Cleopatra. But Warhol understood his 1963 portraits of Liz somewhat differently: "I started those a long time ago, when she was so sick and everybody said she was going to die. Now I'm doing them all over, putting bright colors on her lips and eyes" (Quoted in op. cit., p. 69). In this respect, the present painting is outstanding, and indeed recuperative in many respects. This example not only incorporates a blue background, which reprises the dominant color of Warhol's earlier Cleopatra image, but it also includes a deep violet hue in Liz's irises, reproducing Taylor's actual eyecolor, a most characteristic feature of her celebrated beauty.

Warhol's silk screened paintings, begun in 1962, are some of his best-known and most experimental works. His celebrity portraits started with a pencil-tracing based on a photograph, usually a publicity image or a film still. The background colors were sprayed or brushed onto the canvas, and then each color section was applied by hand prior to the transfer of the black silkscreened image. The colors in the present painting--Liz' luminous lavendar skin, deep violet eyes, garish green eyeshadow, and saucy scarlet lips--create a unequivocally vibrant portrait--an image which revels in its own artificiality, an elaborate construction whose illusion is undone through conscious slippages and obvious striations. Each color is strikingly uniform, and together these hues, though carefully layered, produce a forcefully flattened image, a painting which, like Liz's celebrity persona, is all surface, recalling the artist's cryptic comment about the superficiality of his own image: "If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it" (Quoted in K. McShine, Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, exh. cat., New York, 1989, p. 457). Moreover, Warhol recognized the artifice inherent in film, and everyday life: "All my films are artificial, but then everything is sort of artificial. I don't know where the artificial stops and the real starts" (Quoted in ibid., p. 461). In this way, Warhol's celebrity portraits altered the face of fame in the American imagination, expanding the possiblities beyond Liz's celebrity and his own stardom, to offer everyone else their infamous "fifteen minutes."

The present painting was first owned by Edie Sedgwick, a vivacious young beauty who figured prominently into Warhol's art and his life during the 1960s. Sedgwick was included in several of Warhol's films. In 1965, she made her first cameo appearance in Vinyl and had more extensive parts in other films, most notably securing the lead role in Poor Little Rich Girl for which she was perfectly suited. As Warhol commented, "To play the poor little rich girl in the movie, Edie didn't need a script--if she'd needed a script, she wouldn't have been right for the part" (Quoted in ibid., p. 460).


(fig. 1) Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick in front of the Empire State Building, fashion shoot for Condé Nast. c 2000 Photograph by David McCabe.

(fig. 2) Press photograph of Elizabeth Taylor from Warhol's collection, 1950s. Archives Study Center, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. c 2000 Estate of Andy Warhol/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

(fig. 3) Blue Liz as Cleopatra, 1963, Sammlung Daros, Switzerland. Photograph Courtesy Alesco, Zurich.

(fig. 4) Andy Warhol in the Factory with Liz. c 2000 Estate of Andy Warhol/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.