Gold Marilyn Monroe

Andy Warhol, 1962 · Gallery 420 · Floor 4

Alright, so... Uncle Andy needs a hand. It's 1962. Marilyn Monroe has just died, and Andy Warhol is at home making Marilyns. His nephew remembers helping out. Stretching canvases, moving stuff. Her face being printed one after another on canvas rolled out across the parquet floor. But this one gets almost seven feet of gold. One face in the middle. Look how much room the gold gets. Look how little she gets. He just started working with silkscreens. Take a photograph, turn it into a screen, and you can print it again and again. The picture of her he's using was used to sell a movie called Niagara. It's nine years old already. Anyway, Andy used to draw shoes for a living. Magazine ads. Department stores. Actual money. He knew his way around a picture made to sell something. And he knew another kind of picture, too. Warhol grew up Byzantine Catholic, going to church with his mother. All those saints surrounded by gold. People have compared this painting to one of those. Same sort of setting. But ya know... a... slightly different famous face. But look close at her. The turquoise eye shadow doesn't quite stay on the eyelids. The lipstick's a little off too. He painted the colors first, then printed the face over them. So the makeup and Marilyn don't quite meet. By November, this is hanging in his New York show. Philip Johnson, the architect, buys it and gives it to MoMA. The first Warhol they ever took. That same year, Warhol also paints a newspaper front page about a plane crash. No gold on that one. Big headline though: 129 Die. Later, when he's asked about his death paintings, he brings up the Marilyns himself. "I realized that everything I was doing must have been Death."

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