Even after he had achieved a certain level of success as an artist, it was not, at first, the kind of success that brought him into contact with Hollywood stars. His portraits of Brando, Elvis and Liz Taylor again came from printed sources.
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Marilyn Monroe
Warhol’s portraits of Marilyn Monroe were necessarily taken from photographs, since he began using her image only after her death, and of course his paintings of her are not portraits in the same way that his silk-screens of, say, Mick Jagger or Grace Jones are. They are in no sense taken from life. They all manipulate and use Marilyn’s image for aesthetic or symbolic effect. They celebrate her image and perhaps her life, but by no means are all of them glamorous, and some of them are downright eerie. They show her face as a mask, somewhere between a life-mask and a death-mask. They remind us of beauty and death in equal proportions.
The Marilyn Diptych* of 1962, for example, is two vast canvas panels each with 25 Marilyn faces, arranged in a five by five grid.
≡ Diptych: a painting made on two joined but detachable panels.
The left half shows more or less identical images but they’re garishly coloured, the hair is bright yellow, the lips fire engine red, the skin bubble gum pink.
The right panel has 25 images printed in black straight onto the canvas, some so heavily inked as to be almost obliterated, while others fade out into nothingness towards the top right corner of the panel. As a metaphor for the transience of glamour and beauty, for the inevitability of death, particularly of a movie star, this fading and thinning of colour and ink is just about perfect.
Marilyn’s Lips, also 1962, is another diptych, this time showing long rows of Marilyn’s slightly parted lips. They are disembodied, floating on the canvas, and the piece seems to contain references to Man Ray’s lips in the sky, to Dali’s Mae West sofa, perhaps even to Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat. But essentially the lips look stamped out, mass produced; the icon is reduced to its detachable elements.
In all the Marilyns, the use of different, often ‘wrong’, colours profoundly affects the way we read the face. They are like the effects produced by make-up or perhaps by changes in movie lighting. There is a 1967 portfolio of ten silk-screens, each 36 inches square, each using a different set of colours. Some colour combinations leave Marilyn’s glamour more or less intact (if a little cartoonish and overstated), and the image remains that of the Marilyn we know. Others do violence to the image, transform it, leaving Marilyn looking sinister or sickly or deathly.
You could, if you wanted, read some misogyny into this manipulation and distortion of the face of a beautiful woman. Marilyn’s beauty is toyed with, falsified, sometimes destroyed; but that doesn’t seem to be quite what Warhol is up to. The obsession and fascination, with glamour, transience and death feels genuine.
When Warhol came to revisit these images of Marilyn in the Reversal series made between 1977 and 1986 he created a number of works called Multi-colored Marilyns, sometimes using as few as four repeated images, sometimes using as many as 18. But multi-coloured isn’t the most obvious way you would describe them. The canvases are mostly black. Repeated images of Marilyn, as though in a black and white photographic negative, cover most of the surface, and a background wash of colours shows through in just a few places, where the eyes, eyebrows and lips are. The teeth however, because white in the orginal, are now an alarming dense black. The image of Marilyn Monroe is still just about recognizable, although arguably it wouldn’t be if we hadn’t seen it in so many Warhol silk-screens, but now she looks like a ghost, something sinister and deathly, something from the other side. These are true portraits of the dead Marilyn Monroe.
Perhaps Warhol’s most controversial early portraits were those of the Thirteen Most Wanted Men. The architect Philip Johnson had designed the New York State Pavilion for the 1964 World’s Fair, and he gave a number of Pop Artists space on the outside of the building to display their art.
Warhol silk-screened 13 grainy portraits, police mug shots of what we must now call ‘alleged criminals’. The work consisted of 25 panels, each four feet square, showing side and front views of the men, and since some of the panels were left blank, not every man was shown in both views.
Trouble came because, according to Johnson, these 13 men weren’t really the most wanted at all. Some had already been caught, served their time and released, and some of them were living at home with their families. Under pressure from the Fair’s organizers and amid accusations of censorship, the panels were duly sprayed silver.
Once again Warhol went for fame if not glamour. The men in the portraits certainly look brutish, aggressive and disreputable, but Warhol is not simply celebrating their status as criminals, he is portraying them because he thought they were the most famous criminals at that moment, the top 13 criminals.
In fact it appears that Warhol would have been quite content to continue using extant images as the basis of his art. It was largely the fear of legal action by the copyright owners of the photographs that made him stop. Warhol was becoming rich enough to be worth suing.
He saw the advantages of creating his own source material, and because of his own growing fame he was soon in a position to meet and portray the kinds of subject who had once seemed to belong to a quite different world. These people did not ‘sit’ for their portrait in quite the way that a subject would sit for a more conventional portrait painter. Rather they took part in a photoshoot with a make-up person and many assistants. Warhol would take a great many Polaroids of them and then work from a photograph rather than from life.
These sessions had many witnesses and are the source of numerous anecdotes. Victor Bockris, for example, reports on the session when Warhol travelled to photograph Muhammad Ali at his training camp in Pennsylvania. Ali delivers endless ranting monologues on the evils of racism, prostitution and homosexuality, while Warhol clicks away with his Polaroid camera and is finally moved to say to Ali;
“Could we do some where you’re not…er, talking?” (in Traveler’s Digest, Winter 1977, pp.3–5).
The Ali session was part of his series of portraits of American sports stars, a reasonably Warholian theme, and his portraits of certain iconic Pop celebrities seemed fair enough. But his active pursuit of Imelda Marcos or the Shah of Iran, desperately wanting them to be his subjects, showed not only a blind quest for money, but arguably an absence of moral sensibility.
However, although Warhol may have been a court painter, of sorts, the best of his portraits of the famous are surprisingly revelatory. They don’t take the celebrities quite at their own value, and it is not simply a matter of making them look bad or ugly as a way of cutting them down to size. His portrait of Jane Fonda, for example, does not appear deliberately unflattering, her glamour remains essentially intact, and yet the portrait also reveals an anxiety, a tension, a steely hostility that one had always suspected yet never quite seen in the actress.
A lot of the rich and powerful men look like very nasty pieces of work indeed, and many of the beautiful women appear self-regarding and empty. In a telephone call to David Bourdon, quoted in Bourdon’s Warhol he claimed;