Andy Warhol: Marilyn

Andy Warhol has been considered one of the most important, consistent and popular proponents of American Pop Art since 1960. Warhol, who started as a commercial graphics artist, took his subjects from the world of advertising and media. His dominant structural characteristic is the sequence, his frequently recurring technique is screenprint based on photos, allowing for multiple repetitions of the same picture motifs. Warhol worked with his assistants in his "Factory", was a writer and musician (Velvet Underground) and made films (including Sleep 1963, Heat 1974).

His main themes included still lifes and portraits of international society. Andy Warhol never met most of the people he portrayed. He knew their faces only from the media and took portrait models of his figures from magazines or self-made Polaroids. The serious and the trivial, the horrible and the fashionable exist in his image world seamlessly next to one another. After the long predominance of Abstract Art, modern commonplaces become worthy of depiction again. Marilyn Monroe was made into the idol of American post-war society by the film metropolis of Hollywood. The artist captured her face, which appears mask-like through the make-up, in many icon-like pictures.
Picture: © VBK, Vienna 2003