Marilyn Monroe 22 by Andy Warhol is a screenprint from the artist’s Marilyn Monroe series published in 1967. Also known as the “red” or “purple-red” Marilyn, this mesmerizing portrait of Hollywood’s Darling is infused with hues of sunset, offering a poetic twist on her iconic imagery, as if the essence of the fading day itself graced her visage. The Marilyn series is among Warhol’s most iconic and genre-defining creations. Just like his Campbell’s Soup Cans, the portfolio earned Andy his title as the pioneer of pop-art, and was greatly influential in the success of the new art movement.
Each Marilyn Monroe depicts the actress bathed in vibrant hues and flat colors, a signature of Andy’s style and the Pop Art sensibility. Within the portfolio, Warhol’s reverie dances, a hypnotic waltz with American pop culture’s kaleidoscope, consumerism’s enchanting allure, mass-production’s symphony of creation, fame’s ephemeral embrace, and the haunting whispers of death’s eternal mystery.
Andy Warhol originally became inspired to paint Marilyn Monroe’s portrait after her tragic suicide in 1962. In the weeks following her death, he produced Marilyn Diptych, a diptych including fifty images of the actress, in fading colors and black and white. Though his experimentation with Marilyn first began as a memorial, Warhol continued to reproduce her portrait many times in his life, seeing her as the perfect muse. As an icon of American entertainment, her life represented a sacred intersection of beauty, fame, and death.
For all of his portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Warhol used the same photo, a publicity shot taken by Gene Korman for Marilyn’s 1953 film Niagara. Repeatedly borrowing the image for his own portfolio, Warhol eventually attracted an enduring controversy around the ethics of appropriating imagery for one’s own art and commercial gain. This gained the Marilyn images added notoriety, but the works were still extremely successful upon release, and are still some of his most famous works. The series helped Warhol reach the heights of the Pop art movement, and is a highly significant piece of art history.
Post-war industrialism was something of a modern miracle of the 20th century for Andy Warhol. Dubbing his art studio “The Factory,” Warhol created a high volume of repetitive and iconic images, imitating the mass-production model that America’s economy was adopting expeditiously. Warhol’s printing technique produced hundreds of Marilyn prints, painting the superstar as an object of consumption in a capitalist society. Not only was Marilyn Monroe’s image a piece of art in a gallery or a memory on a movie screen, but a brand. In the stillness of her expression and perfection of her complexion, Warhol creates a sterility that sheds her humanness and showcases Monroe as an idea, not an individual.
Both in her lifetime and after, Marilyn Monroe came to embody Hollywood culture and the potential success offered by the entertainment industry, and ultimately, the “American Dream.” As much as Warhol was an artist in the visual sense, he was a master of predicting pop culture trends, building his artistic acumen by being a consumer of such trends himself. Similar to his Ads portfolio, where he masterfully elevated branded products to the realm of iconic symbolism, in his depictions of celebrities, Warhol transformed them into hyperreal embodiments of fame, opulence and American success. Warhol’s ingenious use of already prominent imagery and celebrities allowed them to become self-advertising commodities, seamlessly intertwining with the essence of American success and affluence. In turn, his creations transcended mere art, metamorphosing into tangible manifestations of America’s thriving pop culture, embodying its pulsating heartbeat and thriving within the very fabric of the nation’s collective consciousness.
Andy’s many appropriations of celebrity identities such as Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Mick Jagger, Muhammad Ali, and Jackie Kennedy are an ironic realization of the paradoxical interplay between fame and commercialization in his art. Through these captivating portrayals, he not only immortalizes these iconic figures but also underscores the unsettling truth of their transformation into marketable symbols, forever intertwined with the allure and extravagance of American pop culture.
In the grand tapestry of Andy Warhol’s artistic voyage, the Marilyn Monroe portfolio unfolds like a breathtaking sunset, and nestled within this celestial display, Marilyn 22 emerges as a mesmerizing moment forever captured in the fabric of his oeuvre. Like the fading embers of the sun’s descent, Marilyn 22 radiates its own luminous aura, leaving an indelible mark on the artistic horizon, a testament to the King of Pop Art’s mastery in immortalizing Marilyn Monroe’s enigmatic allure and the intertwining of fame, consumerism, and American glamour amidst the ever-changing hues of Warhol’s brilliant body of work.
Photo Credit: Warhol Holding Marilyn Acetate I – 1964. Photo by William John Kennedy.
