Date: 30-07-2000
Owning Institution: Tate Modern, London
Publication:         Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”  
Subject:       20th Century    

Marilyn Monroe (born Norma Jean Mortensen, 1926) died during the night of 4-5 August 1962 at the Mexican-style bungalow which she had recently bought in Hollywood, Los Angeles. It was the first house that she had owned in her own name, having previously lived at more than 40 addresses but invariably in rented accommodation. The star of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How to Marry a Millionaire, Some Like It Hot and The Misfits, she was at the time one of the most famous women in the world.

Her life does not seem to have been a happy one. Born poor and illegitimate, she had never known her father and had spent her childhood in various foster homes and orphanages. She had been married three times, most recently to playwright Arthur Miller, but each marriage had ended in divorce. On the night of her death she was found naked in bed with a telephone in one hand and an empty sleeping-pill bottle by her side. During the day in question, however, she had done little to suggest that she was feeling especially desperate. A regular insomniac, she had spent the morning trying to catch up on her sleep. She had seen a photographer to approve some pictures of her for a magazine, then taken delivery of some shrubs and trees for her garden. In the early evening she had ordered some antipasti from a local Italian restaurant. She had been invited to a party at the house of Bobby Kennedy, but had decided not to attend.

Friends later said they thought it odd that she should have chosen this particular moment to commit suicide, just when she seemed to be making a fresh start in life. Conspiracy theorists have suggested that there were those in or close to the Kennedy clan who would not have been sorry to see her dead. She had been closely involved both with the President, JFK, and with his brother Bobby, and may have known more about them than they liked. But as others have pointed out, if the Kennedys had really felt the need to assassinate every film actress they had ever slept with, there would not have been many leading ladies left alive in Hollywood.

Andy Warhol (born Andrew Warhola, 1928) was not in the least bit interested in any of that when, in the immediate aftermath of the star’s death, he created Marilyn Diptych. Stories bored him. Theories bored him. Quirks of personality, tales of human unhappiness or unhappiness, the ins and outs of people’s lives – such things struck him as thoroughly tedious. “I want to be a machine,” he famously proclaimed. This explains his use of the relatively impersonal technique of photographic silkscreen printing to generate the multiple images of Marilyn Monroe which constitute this work. Silkscreen is a type of stencil often used by artists for the purposes of print-making and was traditionally prepared by hand. But Warhol applied his image to the screen photographically. This enabled him to repeat the same picture of Marilyn, flashing her trademark smile, 50 times across his canvas.

What was it about Marilyn that attracted Warhol in the first place? He admired her for being dead, for one thing. The dead have no feelings, and the complete absence of emotion was a condition to which he claimed to aspire. He also liked the way she looked in the films and photographs that principally preserved her memory: the pure artifice of her dyed, platinum-blonde hair, her heavily made-up features and the inscrutable fixity of the smile she presented to the publicity stills photographer. All this, too, took her away from dull, frail, weak, changeable nature and made her seem attractively inhuman: a curious sort of higher being, far above the variable mundanity of everyday existence. On the left-hand panel of his diptych, he has enhanced the artifice of her image by setting it on a goldish ground. It makes her look a little bit like a Byzantine icon, multiplied.