Michael Wais Jr.

Andy Warhol - “Marilyn” Analysis

Text is by Michael Wais; Copyright October 3, 2011

Andy Warhol - “Marilyn”

Andy Warhol’s Marilyn is illumined by successive intense colors.

The colors and background used are concentrated in an extremely minimal manner of painting. Each of the successive colors are merged together in such a photorealistic manner as if to create a “collage” type of effect. Instead of the use of cool colors, Warhol uses many wild and bright paints to deconstruct the original American “apple pie” construct of Marilyn Monroe.

The picture is made more photorealistic by the perfect and faint green background that is behind this portrait of Marilyn Monroe. By using the purest singularity of color in back, each of the polished illumined colors of Marilyn Monroe’s image are especially given emphasis.

All of the colors have the purest and highest value to keep this image anything but calm. Marilyn’s crimson lips and faint blue eyeshadow are modulated to have the 1970’s appeal of a glamorous transvestite showgirl.

Her yellow hair is given the most lamp-like appearance, with her vast coif sitting above her head as if it was cut and then pasted onto this image. A very faint boundary that is an obtuse absence of a hairline lies between the forehead and the scalp of hair. More photorealistic shading is used in her hair, making it appear more false against the rest.

Even Marilyn Monroe’s nose, eyes, and lips are shown as if they were given equal attention like individual paintings instead of given attention as the sum of the whole image. This element of making the familiar obscure and establishing advertisement as false is what makes this painting furiously postmodern.

Monroe’s teeth are showing in gleaming white behind her thick lips, as if posturing for a toothpaste advertisement or a middle-class type of a false smile.

Her earrings are shown as silhouettes of pretty pink bows underneath her wonderful and brilliant hair.

More indistinguishable are the shadows around her cheeks, nose, and neck, which look like they were inked for an adult comic book like the artwork in Heavy Metal magazine or the art of Robert Crumb.

Her brow is not furrowed but is instead calm and divorced from anguish, like the eyes of a pill-popping suburban housewife. Under the eyebrows her eyelashes are full and her eyelids are low enough to not appear enticing, but instead half-asleep. The original sexual and sultry manner of the eyelids is removed in an artfully postmodern way by the overuse of the faint blue color of paint used for the eyeshadow. Her pupils are dilated against the thinnest, faintest green that is the same hue as the background “wallpaper” behind Monroe. The fullness of the pupils and the faintness of the hardly noticeable iris show that she has no identity- that her eyes are hollow and vacant.

Andy Warhol has effectively taken a sex-symbol and icon from the sexually repressed 1950s and put her into the new and reckless generation of the 1970s, the intense and daring era of punk-rock and disco.

(Source: popartheaven.org)

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