[Update] Andy Warhol’s ‘Marilyn Diptych’, a Scene of Tragic Glamour | diptych – Australia.xemloibaihat

Marilyn Diptych, 1962

Andy Warhol, 1963. Sold at Sotheby’s New York for $105.4 Million in 2013.

T
he summer of 1962 was one of the most pivotal artistic periods in Andy Warhol’s luminous career. In August of that year, he began to experiment with skill screening, a process that would come to define his oeuvre with its industrial, manufactured quality. In Marilyn Monroe, he found the perfect subject for his new medium, an extraordinary embodiment of the cult of celebrity and the shadow of tragedy – his two artistic obsessions. From the time of Monroe’s death until the New Year, Warhol created 20 silkscreen paintings based on a publicity photograph of Monroe from the 1953 film . Among these, , a haunting mixture of vivid color and ghostly black and white that resides in the permanent collection of Tate Modern, London, is the pinnacle.

Of that summer, Warhol recalled:
“

Andy Warhol in front of two paintings from his Marilyn series. Photograph by Donald Getsug.

Warhol repeats Monroe’s face 50 times across the two panels that compose in five columns by ten rows. On the left panel, Monroe’s iconic visage is rendered in vivid, almost garish hues: bright yellow for her hair, pink for skin, blue on her heavily lidded eyes and a reddened lip set against a glowing orange background – a striking hyperbole of the opulence of celebrity. As with his Campbell Soup Cans or Brillo Boxes, he has chosen an image so ubiquitous in popular culture as to become simultaneously unseen or unregistered. Monroe’s famed countenance is but one more mass-produced image in Warhol’s artistic lexicon. In its slight variations and saturated tones, the left-hand panel presents not the likeness of the woman herself, but a mask that is inscrutable, impervious to the gaze, and only heightens the distance between the viewer and the figure.

In stark contrast, the right-hand panel presents the same repeated image in silver under-paint with black overlay. The silver hue obliquely references Hollywood’s “silver screen,” while also calling to mind the repetitive printings of black-and-white tabloid papers. Through Warhol, Monroe’s death haunts the painting. Black ink pools thickly, obliterating her face, or renders too faintly, resulting in a barely visible impression of the actress disappearing from the canvas. The serial repetition takes on the sinister quality of the very tabloid papers which both tortured her life and glamorized her death.

This assembly-line sameness exploits the silkscreen method, and its commercial roots. Warhol worked in advertising before he turned to fine arts. The son of Slovakian immigrants born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 6 August 1928, he attended Pictorial Design from the Carnegie Institute of Technology and in 1949, Warhol moved to New York, where he became one of the most successful and imitated illustrators of the 1950s, with clients that included and Tiffany & Co.

Andy Warhol,, 1972. Sold at Sotheby’s New York for $32.4 Million in 2017.

And yet transcends the contemporary. In the work’s two-panel format, Warhol recalls Byzantine and Renaissance Christian religious devotional imagery of saints, which often positioned the Virgin Mary on one side and the crucified Jesus on the other. In this way the opposing panels were a commentary on the relation between Monroe’s life and death, as well as an idolization of celebrity.  

The celebrities of Warhol’s artistic fascination – including Marilyn Monroe, but also Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Elvis Presley – were each colored by personal despair, violence and tragedy. Looking back to his pivotal 1962 canvas Warhol remarked, “I realized that everything I was doing must have been death…when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn’t really have any effect.”

In this way, is reminiscent of Made the following year in 1963, it sold at Sotheby’s New York in 2013 for $105.4 million, a record for the artist. Another diptych, the repeated image of a car crash scene is juxtaposed against a panel of silver, a color Warhol thought represented the future and was his reinterpretation of the gold leaf that prevailed in Medieval iconography.

By the time of Warhol’s own death in 1987, he was one of the best-known artists in the world and he had achieved the very cult-level of celebrity he had so fixated on artistically. It went so far that in 1968, he was the victim of an attempted assassination. In the decades since his death, his stature has flourished and his artworks feature prominently in many of the world’s most renowned museum collections including those of the Tate Modern, London, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the city of this birth, holds the largest collection of Warhol’s artworks and archival materials in the world. This year, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, held Andy Warhol From A to B and Back Again – the first Warhol retrospective organized in the United States since 1989 – that explored the interconnected themes linking his disparate artistic endeavors and introduced a Warhol for the 21st century.

Marilyn Diptych was the first painting in which Warhol used the assembly-line technique of silk-screening photographic images onto a canvas, permitting him to create many versions of a single subject, instead of hand painting. Like everyone else in America, Warhol was attracted to American movie stars like Monroe.

The photograph Warhol uses of Monroe is a publicity photograph from the movie Niagara, marking his interest in her public self and not in her private self. . By placing Monroe’s portraits in the diptych, Warhol is commenting on the saint-like nature of the famous, which gives them a kind of holiness and immortality.

How did Andy Warhol make Marilyn Diptych?

The Marilyn Diptych is a silkscreen painting which contains fifty images of the actress, all taken from the 1953 film Niagara. Warhol explained: . With silkscreening you pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue.

Why did Andy Warhol paint Marilyn Diptych?

By placing Marilyn Monroe’s portraits in the diptych, Warhol was commenting on the saint-like nature that fans assign celebrities, which in turn causes the public to approach celebrities with some sense of holiness and immortality.

What is the meaning of Marilyn Diptych?

Marilyn Diptych was the first painting in which Warhol used the assembly-line technique of silk-screening photographic images onto a canvas, permitting him to create many versions of a single subject, instead of hand painting. Like everyone else in America, Warhol was attracted to American movie stars like Monroe.

Why did Andy Warhol make images of Marilyn Monroe?

Because there was something otherworldly about celebrities like Liza and Marilyn, Warhol always wanted his women to look like true beauties. As such, there were never under eye circles, any acne, or any furrowed6 foreheads for his beauties as he had to present them as society saw them (perfectly) in his silkscreens.

Does Warhol’s image of Marilyn Monroe?

It was pure coincidence that Warhol chose Monroe to feature in his earliest and possibly most famous works of pop art. Although she had already ended her life at the time of the painting, her face and her fame provided Warhol with a great basis for his repetitive print and animation-like work in the future.

What is a diptych in art?

A diptych is a painting or relief carving made of two parts, which are usually joined by hinges. They are invariably small in size and, if an altarpiece, were used for private devotion. Diptychs are hinged so that they can be closed like a book to protect the interior paintings.

Why did Andy Warhol create Marilyn Monroe?

By placing Marilyn Monroe’s portraits in the diptych, Warhol was commenting on the saint-like nature that fans assign celebrities, which in turn causes the public to approach celebrities with some sense of holiness and immortality.

What are 2 paintings together called?

As an art term a diptych is an artwork consisting of two pieces or panels, that together create a singular art piece these can be attached together or presented adjoining each other.

What did Andy Warhol use for Marilyn Monroe?

Using photo-stencils in screen-printing, Warhol uses photographic images for his screenprints. The screen is prepared using a photographic process, and then different color inks are printed using a rubber squeegee to press the paint onto the painting through the screen.

What is the Marilyn Monroe painting called?

The Marilyn Diptych

What materials did Andy Warhol use?

In his paintings, Andy Warhol both used traditional media such as ink, watercolor, and spray paint (mainly early on) and experimented with materials.

How do you make a diptych?

– Step 1: Open Your Two Images In Photoshop. .
– Step 2: Resize The Images To The Same Height. .
– Step 3: Select And Copy The Resized Image. .
– Step 4: Paste The Image Into The Other Photo’s Document. .
– Step 5: Rename The Background Layer. .
– Step 6: Add A Solid Color Fill Layer. .
– Step 7: Drag The Solid Color Fill Layer Below Layer 0.

What materials did pop artists use?

Pop art, art in which commonplace objects (such as comic strips, soup cans, road signs, and hamburgers) were used as subject matter and were often physically incorporated into the work. Campbell’s Soup Cans, polymer paint on canvas by Andy Warhol, 1962; a selection of five on display in the Museumsquartier, Vienna.

What other celebrities did Warhol create images of?

Using tabloid photographs or publicity shots for his screen-prints, Warhol produced an impressive number of celebrity portraits, including Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Kennedy and Marylin Monroe, who was Warhol’s first silkscreen-print subject.

How do you make a diptych in Lightroom?

To create the diptychs, sort the images into pairs (I prefer using collections to do this). Then, in the Print module, create a template at the correct size using the Print Job panel (19.20 x 10.80 at 100 ppi for HD videos for example). Select the images, and choose Print To File.

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