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Lot Essay
Andy Warhol's art plundered and celebrated popular culture and popular images throughout the world. By the late 1970s, his visual idiom was known throughout the world. The Warhol look had itself become part of popular culture, as recognizable as Coca-Cola.
It was therefore only natural that Warhol should turn, at this point of his intensely successful career, to his own images as sources for his work. And of these, perhaps his Marilyns were the best known Warhol pictures. These works had gained him notoriety and had entered the cultural ether in a revolutionary and complete way that almost no art had managed before it.
Rather than merely revisit his own older work, Warhol created a new visual idiom in order to reincarnate, to rebottle, his classic theme: the negative image. The 'Reversal Series' introduces an aesthetic that pulses with electricity. In Nine Multicoloured Marilyns (Reversal Series), Warhol sets Marilyn on a black background, with her features captured in livid, lurid, ever-changing colours. The face thus mysteriously emerges in psychedelic negative. Warhol presents us with a Marilyn for the Disco era.
Warhol was a tireless innovator, and the negative images that he used in the Reversal Series showed his continuing willingness to experiment. Indeed, in a recent exhibition of his late works that is still traveling around Europe (and is currently in Lyon), a mind-boggling assembly of his most experimental works from the last decade of his life has helped to prompt a reappraisal of his art from this period. Alongside the Reversals, we see works that show the artist to have been brimming with pioneering ideas, both in terms of content and of technique. Warhol was extremely proactive in constantly developing his art, and so in Nine Multicoloured Marilyns (Reversal Series) we see the proof of his statement, 'They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself' (Warhol, quoted in K. Honnef, Andy Warhol 1928-1987 Commerce into Art, Cologne, 2000, p. 90).
Fusing both content and technique, Nine Multicoloured Marilyns (Reversal Series) reveals the natural evolution of the thinking that lay behind Warhol's Pop. By questioning the nature of art and beauty from the beginning, Pop Art had often appeared extremely self-referential. On the one hand, the viewer can see something infinitely transparent and recognizable, in this case the image of a celebrity; on the other hand, the popular nature of the source image challenges notions of the purpose of art. Should 'Art' involve craftsmanship? Should it represent only 'worthy' themes? In these aspects, Warhol remained a constant enigma. His exceptional draughtsmanship, with which he had initially made his name, proved that he could paint if he wanted to, but instead he favoured the mechanical silkscreen process, finding in it a method of artistic creation that he felt was more suited to the world of modernity and technology. Regarding subject matter, what was more beautiful than Marilyn? Why should a picture of her be any less artistic than one of Diane de Poitiers or Madame de Pompadour or an anonymous, cryptic, smiling Italian woman?
In the original Marilyns, Warhol had raised all these questions, and taken pleasure in not answering them. By exploring the same motif again more than a decade later in his Nine Multicoloured Marilyns (Reversal Series), the self-referential nature of his work has increased exponentially. Warhol has not only challenged notions of the value of Marilyn's image as artistic content, but has laid claim to his own artistic legacy as material hallowed and worthy enough to merit representation. These nine portrait images are bold challenges, each one pouting like some celebrity Sphinx, conundrums for a new generation of Pop artists and Pop admirers.
The almost Day-Glo colours with which Warhol has presented Marilyn in these works recall some of his earliest depictions of her, where unlikely, lurid and pallid colours were deliberately used to depict the recently deceased star. There was a sense of violence and affront in his choice of colour that sharpened its shock factor. It is important, in considering the conundrum that is Andy Warhol, to reflect on the death-related origins of Marilyn as a theme in his work:
'I guess it was the big plane crash picture, the front page of a newspaper: 129 DIE. I was also painting the Marilyns. I realized that everything I was doing must have been Death. It was Christmas or Labor Day - a holiday - and every time you turned on the radio they said something like "4 million are going to die." That started it. But when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn't really have any effect' (Warhol, quoted in Andy Warhol Death and Disasters, exh.cat., Houston, 1988, p. 19).
In revisiting Marilyn, Warhol is revisiting Death. His obsession with glamour, which spilled into his art, meant that many of his works appeared to form modern memento mori. Warhol had only begun producing images of Marilyn once she had died, meaning that the audience first exposed to his Marilyns was acutely aware of the morbid content involved. The jarringly lurid colours and reduction of Marilyn's features to the barest and starkest delineations resulted in a deathly pallor in the 1960s pictures.
These references to death appear to be accentuated in the darkness of the negative image in Warhol's Reversal series: In Nine Multicoloured Marilyns (Reversal Series), she emerges from the darkness like some disco ectoplasm, a conjured spirit dancing before our eyes. Here we see, committed to silkscreen, a new proof of Warhol's maxim that, 'Death can really make you look like a star' (Warhol, Andy Warhol's TV on Saturday Night Live, 1981, quoted in G. Celant, Andy Warhol: A Factory, exh. cat., Bilbao, 2000, unpaged).
It was therefore only natural that Warhol should turn, at this point of his intensely successful career, to his own images as sources for his work. And of these, perhaps his Marilyns were the best known Warhol pictures. These works had gained him notoriety and had entered the cultural ether in a revolutionary and complete way that almost no art had managed before it.
Rather than merely revisit his own older work, Warhol created a new visual idiom in order to reincarnate, to rebottle, his classic theme: the negative image. The 'Reversal Series' introduces an aesthetic that pulses with electricity. In Nine Multicoloured Marilyns (Reversal Series), Warhol sets Marilyn on a black background, with her features captured in livid, lurid, ever-changing colours. The face thus mysteriously emerges in psychedelic negative. Warhol presents us with a Marilyn for the Disco era.
Warhol was a tireless innovator, and the negative images that he used in the Reversal Series showed his continuing willingness to experiment. Indeed, in a recent exhibition of his late works that is still traveling around Europe (and is currently in Lyon), a mind-boggling assembly of his most experimental works from the last decade of his life has helped to prompt a reappraisal of his art from this period. Alongside the Reversals, we see works that show the artist to have been brimming with pioneering ideas, both in terms of content and of technique. Warhol was extremely proactive in constantly developing his art, and so in Nine Multicoloured Marilyns (Reversal Series) we see the proof of his statement, 'They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself' (Warhol, quoted in K. Honnef, Andy Warhol 1928-1987 Commerce into Art, Cologne, 2000, p. 90).
Fusing both content and technique, Nine Multicoloured Marilyns (Reversal Series) reveals the natural evolution of the thinking that lay behind Warhol's Pop. By questioning the nature of art and beauty from the beginning, Pop Art had often appeared extremely self-referential. On the one hand, the viewer can see something infinitely transparent and recognizable, in this case the image of a celebrity; on the other hand, the popular nature of the source image challenges notions of the purpose of art. Should 'Art' involve craftsmanship? Should it represent only 'worthy' themes? In these aspects, Warhol remained a constant enigma. His exceptional draughtsmanship, with which he had initially made his name, proved that he could paint if he wanted to, but instead he favoured the mechanical silkscreen process, finding in it a method of artistic creation that he felt was more suited to the world of modernity and technology. Regarding subject matter, what was more beautiful than Marilyn? Why should a picture of her be any less artistic than one of Diane de Poitiers or Madame de Pompadour or an anonymous, cryptic, smiling Italian woman?
In the original Marilyns, Warhol had raised all these questions, and taken pleasure in not answering them. By exploring the same motif again more than a decade later in his Nine Multicoloured Marilyns (Reversal Series), the self-referential nature of his work has increased exponentially. Warhol has not only challenged notions of the value of Marilyn's image as artistic content, but has laid claim to his own artistic legacy as material hallowed and worthy enough to merit representation. These nine portrait images are bold challenges, each one pouting like some celebrity Sphinx, conundrums for a new generation of Pop artists and Pop admirers.
The almost Day-Glo colours with which Warhol has presented Marilyn in these works recall some of his earliest depictions of her, where unlikely, lurid and pallid colours were deliberately used to depict the recently deceased star. There was a sense of violence and affront in his choice of colour that sharpened its shock factor. It is important, in considering the conundrum that is Andy Warhol, to reflect on the death-related origins of Marilyn as a theme in his work:
'I guess it was the big plane crash picture, the front page of a newspaper: 129 DIE. I was also painting the Marilyns. I realized that everything I was doing must have been Death. It was Christmas or Labor Day - a holiday - and every time you turned on the radio they said something like "4 million are going to die." That started it. But when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn't really have any effect' (Warhol, quoted in Andy Warhol Death and Disasters, exh.cat., Houston, 1988, p. 19).
In revisiting Marilyn, Warhol is revisiting Death. His obsession with glamour, which spilled into his art, meant that many of his works appeared to form modern memento mori. Warhol had only begun producing images of Marilyn once she had died, meaning that the audience first exposed to his Marilyns was acutely aware of the morbid content involved. The jarringly lurid colours and reduction of Marilyn's features to the barest and starkest delineations resulted in a deathly pallor in the 1960s pictures.
These references to death appear to be accentuated in the darkness of the negative image in Warhol's Reversal series: In Nine Multicoloured Marilyns (Reversal Series), she emerges from the darkness like some disco ectoplasm, a conjured spirit dancing before our eyes. Here we see, committed to silkscreen, a new proof of Warhol's maxim that, 'Death can really make you look like a star' (Warhol, Andy Warhol's TV on Saturday Night Live, 1981, quoted in G. Celant, Andy Warhol: A Factory, exh. cat., Bilbao, 2000, unpaged).