The Star 258 depicts a beautiful woman bathed in deep shades of red and black. She wears a bejeweled headpiece and long earrings that graze her shoulders. She entrances us with her piercing gaze—inviting yet defiant—drawing the in with quiet intensity. Unlike other prints in the Myths series featuring vivid, single-shade backgrounds that help to accentuate the subjects, like in The Witch, the woman in this print dissolves into her surroundings. Warhol highlights her lips and eyes with traces of white and a pop of ice blue eyeshadow, turning the image into a hypnotic study of allure and mystery.
A Portrait of Greta Garbo as Mata Hari
This figure is Swedish-American actress Greta Garbo in her role as Mata Hari in the 1931 film Mata Hari. Inspired by a true story, Garbo plays a Dutch courtesan secretly moonlighting as a German spy during World War I. She uses her feminine wiles to seduce French and Russian diplomats and officers into spilling top-secret military information. However, her deceptions are soon discovered and she is tragically executed for espionage. The print is based on a photograph of the actress in her memorable role, where she is reborn as one of Warhol’s mythic legends.
Garbo’s inclusion in Warhol’s work places her among a lineage of cinematic muses—Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and other Hollywood icons who fascinated him. Each of these women embodied fame’s contradictions: beauty and loneliness, power and vulnerability. By reimagining Garbo through his Pop Art lens, Warhol extends his exploration of celebrity beyond the living star into the realm of memory and myth.
The Myths Portfolio
The Star 258 belongs to Andy Warhol’s Myths Complete Portfolio created in 1981. The series includes ten screenprints that blend fantasy, nostalgia, and popular culture. Instead of celebrity portraits, he depicts figures such as Mickey Mouse, Dracula, Uncle Sam and Superman. These characters, though fictional, symbolize America’s collective imagination and fantasies that shape identity.
Warhol’s fascination with fame and commodification had long defined his art. His portraits of Monroe and Taylor turned film stars into icons of consumer desire. In Myths, he broadened that idea, merging Hollywood and folklore into a shared pantheon of mass-produced legends. As cultural critic Greg Metcalf wrote, “The mythology of America is celebrity. The gods and demigods are those who can sell through their mass-produced images, and the course of action we, as a culture, are called to is to consume.”
The Star 258 in Warhol’s Larger Body of Work
Each print in the Myths portfolio reveals an aspect of Warhol’s own persona. Though he never explained why he chose Garbo’s Mata Hari, her duality—a performer and deceiver—echoes his own fascination with masks and identity. Both artist and actress constructed public selves that blurred truth and artifice, creating lasting images that outlived their creators.
Seen this way, The Star 258 is more than a portrait. It is Warhol’s meditation on fame’s seductive danger and the way myth transforms human figures into eternal symbols. Through Garbo’s eyes, Warhol invites us to look closer—not only at her image, but at his own reflection in it.
Photo Credits:
1- “Andy Warhol holding Dracula Myth,” Robert Levin, 1981.
2- “Andy Warhol at R. Feldman Gallery with Myths,” Robert Levin, 1981.
