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拍品專文
‘These frozen images are modern-day Madonnas. Andy was a strict Catholic. His Marilyn, Liz and Jackie become religious relics, and like Leonardo’s La Gioconda. They are portraits of women radiating beauty. They are not photographs of public stars but… icons of our time’ —P. BRANT
‘In Warhol’s case it is not the images themselves that are of central importance – even if they are in most cases truly powerful and imprint themselves deeply in the memory of the spectator – but the space and time between these images where artistic subjectivity operates’ —B. GROYS
‘I just see Monroe as just another person. As for whether it’s symbolical to paint Monroe in such violent colors: it’s beauty, and she’s beautiful and if something’s beautiful it’s pretty colors, that’s all. Or something. The Monroe picture was part of a death series I was doing, of people who had died by different ways. There was no profound reason for doing a death series, no victims of their time; there was no reason for doing it all, just a surface reason’ —A. WARHOL
Repeated four times, Andy Warhol’s unmistakable Marilyn Monroe is presented in arresting blacklit vision. As in a photographic negative, what were once highlighted areas are now a deep, velvet black, and her shadows shimmer through in lambent, hand-painted strokes of green, coral and red. Four Multicoloured Marilyns (Reversal Series) (1979-86) is one of a key group of works, alongside the Retrospective series executed during the same period, which saw Warhol revisit his most iconic creations. Having multiplied da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in 1963 with his silkscreen Thirty Are Better Than One, Warhol had long ago declared an image’s fame to be more important than its art-historical significance: with his audacious title, he located its value as a commodity fetish rather than as a work of art. In the 1980s he reviewed his own oeuvre alongside further icons from the art-historical canon, situating his Marilyns in the same exalted cultural pantheon and lending them a new, unsettling radiance. This was the ultimate self-reflexive gesture, crowning a career that changed the way we look at images and celebrity forever. The Multicoloured Marilyns glow darkly, as if ignited from within by the light of their own fame.
By this stage, Warhol was a consummate master of the silkscreen, able to combine the medium’s coolly serial mode with the expressive possibilities of paint. In Four Multicoloured Marilyns (Reversal Series), nuanced brushwork in complementary greens and reds shines through the lush blackness of the overlaid silkscreen, creating subtle tonal variations: here a crisp contrast, there light almost melting into shadow. This iterated Monroe is a far cry from the original publicity shot of the starlet, taken for the 1953 film Niagara, on which Warhol’s first Marilyns were based – yet through the power of Warhol’s own manufactured image, seared into public consciousness since the 1960s, she remains instantly recognisable. Inherent to the earliest Marilyn works was the poignancy of the actress’s premature death in 1962, and the ensuing power of the picture as a mode of immortality and memorial. Endlessly reborn in the collective image-world of Pop culture, Monroe is fated to live forever, her likeness at the mercy of the mass media. In this sense the dark Reversal Series takes on an almost demonic edge, registering a shift in tone over the decades of Marilyn’s afterlife in the public eye: the image has taken on its own power beyond even Warhol’s control. In tandem with his retrospective work of the 1980s was a move in other works to subjects tinged with melancholy and mortality – guns, knives, skulls, shadows. Plunged into blackness and shot through with electric colour, the Marilyns also present a morbid reflection on Warhol’s own posthumous legacy.
From appropriation to reappropriation, Warhol’s work ends where it began. Marilyn, however, is transformed: she is now more art object than sex symbol, more icon than real, historical person. For Warhol, her image had first been a way to explore the power of fame and mass culture, and by revisiting her in the Reversal Series at his artistic maturity he was able to examine his own relationship with these themes, and with visual history and society at large. Such was the resonance of his images that they had transcended the American frames of cultural reference that they once embodied: by reconsidering them alongside the work of Botticelli, da Vinci, de Chirico and Munch, Warhol was not merely flattening art history into his own narrative of repetition, commodification and variation, but also establishing himself within that history’s preexisting international canon of great artists. Representing the postmodern culmination of Warhol’s practice, Four Multicoloured Marilyns (Reversal Series) reveals him – despite himself – to be a creator of masterpieces.
‘In Warhol’s case it is not the images themselves that are of central importance – even if they are in most cases truly powerful and imprint themselves deeply in the memory of the spectator – but the space and time between these images where artistic subjectivity operates’ —B. GROYS
‘I just see Monroe as just another person. As for whether it’s symbolical to paint Monroe in such violent colors: it’s beauty, and she’s beautiful and if something’s beautiful it’s pretty colors, that’s all. Or something. The Monroe picture was part of a death series I was doing, of people who had died by different ways. There was no profound reason for doing a death series, no victims of their time; there was no reason for doing it all, just a surface reason’ —A. WARHOL
Repeated four times, Andy Warhol’s unmistakable Marilyn Monroe is presented in arresting blacklit vision. As in a photographic negative, what were once highlighted areas are now a deep, velvet black, and her shadows shimmer through in lambent, hand-painted strokes of green, coral and red. Four Multicoloured Marilyns (Reversal Series) (1979-86) is one of a key group of works, alongside the Retrospective series executed during the same period, which saw Warhol revisit his most iconic creations. Having multiplied da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in 1963 with his silkscreen Thirty Are Better Than One, Warhol had long ago declared an image’s fame to be more important than its art-historical significance: with his audacious title, he located its value as a commodity fetish rather than as a work of art. In the 1980s he reviewed his own oeuvre alongside further icons from the art-historical canon, situating his Marilyns in the same exalted cultural pantheon and lending them a new, unsettling radiance. This was the ultimate self-reflexive gesture, crowning a career that changed the way we look at images and celebrity forever. The Multicoloured Marilyns glow darkly, as if ignited from within by the light of their own fame.
By this stage, Warhol was a consummate master of the silkscreen, able to combine the medium’s coolly serial mode with the expressive possibilities of paint. In Four Multicoloured Marilyns (Reversal Series), nuanced brushwork in complementary greens and reds shines through the lush blackness of the overlaid silkscreen, creating subtle tonal variations: here a crisp contrast, there light almost melting into shadow. This iterated Monroe is a far cry from the original publicity shot of the starlet, taken for the 1953 film Niagara, on which Warhol’s first Marilyns were based – yet through the power of Warhol’s own manufactured image, seared into public consciousness since the 1960s, she remains instantly recognisable. Inherent to the earliest Marilyn works was the poignancy of the actress’s premature death in 1962, and the ensuing power of the picture as a mode of immortality and memorial. Endlessly reborn in the collective image-world of Pop culture, Monroe is fated to live forever, her likeness at the mercy of the mass media. In this sense the dark Reversal Series takes on an almost demonic edge, registering a shift in tone over the decades of Marilyn’s afterlife in the public eye: the image has taken on its own power beyond even Warhol’s control. In tandem with his retrospective work of the 1980s was a move in other works to subjects tinged with melancholy and mortality – guns, knives, skulls, shadows. Plunged into blackness and shot through with electric colour, the Marilyns also present a morbid reflection on Warhol’s own posthumous legacy.
From appropriation to reappropriation, Warhol’s work ends where it began. Marilyn, however, is transformed: she is now more art object than sex symbol, more icon than real, historical person. For Warhol, her image had first been a way to explore the power of fame and mass culture, and by revisiting her in the Reversal Series at his artistic maturity he was able to examine his own relationship with these themes, and with visual history and society at large. Such was the resonance of his images that they had transcended the American frames of cultural reference that they once embodied: by reconsidering them alongside the work of Botticelli, da Vinci, de Chirico and Munch, Warhol was not merely flattening art history into his own narrative of repetition, commodification and variation, but also establishing himself within that history’s preexisting international canon of great artists. Representing the postmodern culmination of Warhol’s practice, Four Multicoloured Marilyns (Reversal Series) reveals him – despite himself – to be a creator of masterpieces.