The Marilyn image is arguably Warhol’s best-known legacy. The image is based on a film still used for the promotion of the 1953 film Niagara, starring Marilyn Monroe, and has been utilised as the basis for both monoprints and serigraphs by the artist. This particular serigraph is from the original portfolio published by Warhol’s own Factory Additions. The portfolio consists of ten different colourways, each printed in an edition of 250 with 26 artist proofs, each of which is annotated with a letter from A to Z. The artist signed each print in pencil on the verso side with either his full signature or only initials; the print offered in this sale is signed with the artist’s full signature. The edition number is also stamped on the reverse.

Warhol made portraiture throughout his career. A great number of the artist’s endeavours, differing in both scope and trajectory, engaged with the tropes and conventions of the tradition. These include but are not limited to: his screen test films, his studio-based photographic portraits and his role as founder and publisher of Interview magazine. The Marilyn works are best contextualised alongside a series of works that the artist began in the early 1960s and continued to make until his death in 1987 (some of which were famously left completed but unsigned). The starting points for these works were images of celebrities appropriated from mass media sources; as well as Marilyn Monroe, Warhol initially used images of figures such as Elvis Presley and Jackie Kennedy and later Mao Zedong, Muhammad Ali and even himself. While the way in which the artist applied colour evolved through the years – the early prints, such as the Marilyn works, are typified by large, solid blocks of colour whereas the placement of colour in the later works follows a more expressive model – the series is unified by the artist’s treatment of the photographic imagery. Bleached out, non-specific and high in contrast, the Warhol look is the product of an arbitrary use of a technical process as much as it is the result of distinguished conceptual consideration. Warhol’s images were generally taken from small-format print media and blown up before they were put onto screens, making obvious the lack of detail present in the source material. Furthermore, the images were transferred to screens using a photographic method that can translate the image only as negative and positive areas, neglecting both colour and tonal variation.

Certain commentators have compared Warhol’s image-making process to that of an abstractionist – a practitioner like Frank Stella serves as a useful point of reference – in that he used the photographic image simply as a constraint within which to work. However, this is not to say that the figurative content of the works does not matter. Even though the colouration of Marilyn is far from naturalistic, the simple, reduced outlines can still clearly be seen to depict the face of Marilyn Monroe. With his Marilyn works and others like it, Warhol took information that was freely available and repackaged it. Rather than explore the features that made each of his subjects unique, the same formulaic treatment was used each time. Warhol’s production line approach to image-making presented his subjects not as individuals but rather, as products. In a manner that was analogous to the way in which these figures had become well known through repeated exposure in the media, at the hand of Warhol, they were quite literally the result of a manufacturing process.

Charles Ninow