Warhol's “Marilyn” and the art of repetition – Serial screen printing as the epitome of pop art
Warhol was a master of provocation. His art, in combination with his personality, soon became an internationally recognized brand in the 1960s. His epochal work, with its garish colors, striking images, and serial nature, quickly earned him a prominent place in international art history. With his iconic first series of prints, “Marilyn Monroe” (1967) and “Campbell's Soup I” (1968), Andy Warhol made the serial repetition of images his artistic trademark. In 1960s New York, the eccentric artist dared to take the art-historically significant step of a radical artistic new beginning, boldly abandoning all traditional notions of art. Warhol fascinatingly merged art and commerce, and suddenly everything that philosopher and art critic Walter Benjamin had envisioned in the first half of the 20th century as a terrifying and apocalyptic scenario for art became reality: Warhol's art is provocative and subtle, playing with authenticity and aura, which had been the central characteristics of art up until then. He scrutinized and put these characteristics to the test with his serial works. His legendary serial screen prints “Marilyn Monroe” and “Campbell's Soup I,” motifs through which Warhol went down in art history, are celebrated as icons of American pop art around the world today, and they are surrounded—seemingly paradoxically—by an extraordinary special aura.

In 1936, Walter Benjamin published his famous essay “Reflection and Aura: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” which is still significant for the art world today. The essay was also quite influential in the United States over the following decades. Benjamin deplored the progressive decline of the auratic and the increasing devaluation of genuine art due to the new possibilities of technical reproduction. According to Benjamin, the ubiquitous possibilities for receiving art through photography and film herald the end of art. However, Warhol, who founded his legendary “Factory” in Manhattan in 1964, instantly made it the cool New York hot spot for artists, musicians, and celebrities, proving us wrong. Warhol turned everything that Benjamin believed would be the end of art into an artistic trademark: his art is serial, striking, and, through the use of photo-based screen printing, rejects not only the demand for originality of motif, but also the manual execution of the artist. In this way, Warhol overcame the shackles of aura and, at the same time, created new art icons.

Warhol's “Marilyn” and “Campbell's Soup I” series, the first two series published by Factory Additions, New York, are among the most famous works of American Pop Art. Silkscreen printing as an artistic medium is as distant from a spontaneous painting gesture as mass production is from an original artwork. In his famous silkscreen series, Warhol succeeds in taking the principle of repetition to the extreme, a principle he had developed in his serial canvases. The outstanding quality of Warhol's epochal artistic work can only be fully appreciated through the sequence and sum of all the images. It is all the more regrettable that only a few complete screenprint series, known as “matching sets,” have survived to this day, as many sheets from the portfolios were sold individually over the years.
The central design principle, which can only be understood in its entirety, is the repetition and variation of the same iconographic theme. Like the Campbell's soup cans that line the shelves of American supermarkets in an almost endless sequence, Hollywood star Marilyn Monroe has also turned into a commodity of American consumer and media culture. The tragic suicide of the famous actress in 1962 unleashed a torrent of images in American magazines. In his iconic series of silkscreen prints, Andy Warhol posthumously immortalized Marilyn, presenting her to the world in a way comparable to an industrial mass product: in bright colors and serial production, entirely in the spirit of her mass media celebrity cult.


Marilyn, over and over again... Warhol's legendary play with repetition
Andy Warhol's “Marilyn” portrait, created in New York in the 1960s, is an icon of modern art. Alongside Leonardo da Vinci's “Mona Lisa” (Musée du Louvre, Paris), Gustav Klimt's “Adele Bloch-Bauer” (Neue Galerie, New York), and Pablo Picasso's “Dora Maar” (Musée Picasso, Paris), it is among the most famous portraits in art history. It is thus little surprising that one of the screenprint paintings with the same motif fetched the highest international price ever for a work by Andy Warhol at an auction in New York in 2022, selling for 160 million euros (“Shot sage blue Marilyn” (1964)). Anyone thinking of Andy Warhol also thinks of “Marilyn,” the first series of prints published in Warhol’s New York Factory Editions in 1967.
"Marilyn Monroe Kills Self. Found Nude in Bed...Hand on Phone...took 40 Pills” read the outrageous headline in the New York Mirror on August 6, 1962, reporting on the death of the Hollywood icon. Shortly after Marilyn's suicide, the mysterious circumstances of which caused an international media frenzy, Warhol began a series of silkscreen paintings based on a famous advertising photograph of the Hollywood star. He used a black-and-white photo Gene Kronman took in 1953 as promotional material for the famous Monroe film “Niagara.”
Based on this black-and-white photograph, the artist first created “Gold Marilyn Monroe” (1962, Museum of Modern Art, New York), his first photo silkscreen painting. In his memoirs “Popism” from 1980, Warhol described this critical moment in his career in the following words: “I started doing silkscreens... when Marilyn Monroe happened to die that month, I got the idea to make screens of her beautiful face – the first Marilyns.” (Popism, New York 1980, p. 22). Henceforth, he created a total of three Marilyn series in the 1960s, all based on the same photographic template: a series of silkscreen paintings in 1962, five photo silkscreen paintings in 1964, one of which was auctioned in 2022 for the aforementioned record price, and finally, in 1967, the famous silkscreen series offered here, comprising a total of ten “Marilyn” portraits. Unfortunately, this series is extremely rare to find as a complete “matching set,” as is the case with the present copy. The first works in this famous portrait series were exhibited at Stable Gallery in New York in November 1962. Michael Fried's euphoric review of the exhibition at the time read as follows: "Art such as Warhol's is necessarily parasitic on the myths of its time and thus indirectly on the machinery of fame and advertising that markets these myths; and it is by no means unlikely that these myths will be incomprehensible (or at least greatly outdated) to subsequent generations. This is ... an anticipated protest against the emergence of a generation that will not be as moved by Warhol's ... icons of Marilyn Monroe as I am. These are, in my opinion, the most successful works in the exhibition ... because Marilyn is one of the preeminent myths of our time." (Michael Fried, New York Letter, in: Art International, December 20, 1962, p. 57). However, neither Fried nor Andy Warhol could have imagined back then how relevant an art form based on advertising photographs and repeatedly addressing American celebrity culture would become in the 21st century, the age of the internet and social media. Warhol's famous quote, “In the future, everybody will be world famous for 15 minutes,” seems downright visionary today. Contrary to the breakneck pace of the flood of images in the print media of the time and today's Internet age, Andy Warhol not only created a lasting monument for Marilyn Monroe with these portraits, but, above all, also for himself. In 1971, New York Magazine celebrated Warhol as the embodiment of the zeitgeist (“The Zeitgeist incarnate”). It declared: “The images he leaves will be the permanent record of America in the sixties.” As we know today, New York Magazine was right. [JS]