Andy Warhol, born in 1928, was an American artist and leading figure in the pop art movement. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, celebrity culture and the advertisements that influenced consumer behavior within the 1960’s. Warhol, aside from his involvement in the pop art movement, also experimented with a variety of materials. Warhol’s most popular works include his Marilyn Monroe, which he created after her death in order to commemorate her, and his food related pop arts, mainly his Campbell Soup Can. Both subject matters relate to Warhol’s interests in celebrities and consumer behavior.
Post Marilyn Monroe’s death, Warhol decided to create artworks using images of her in order to commemorate the starlet. One of his most prominent works, Marilyn Dyptich, is a silk-screen print in which Warhol used a single picture of Marilyn to create fifty silk screens. Each was created with trial and error and used as means of representing the signification behind the work.
As can be seen on the left, the Marilyn’s are created using colour. The colours are bright, vivid and artificial. This represents the limelight Marilyn was under, always being painted with a different attitude for the public. The cartoon like aspect of the colours represents how the media created her personality and how she was never really allowed to be herself. The Marilyn’s change slightly and although this is due to the unexpected qualities of silk-screen printing, they may be used to represent how although she changed a little whilst in the limelight, her artificially created personality never altered by much.
On the right side, the Marilyn’s are in black in white. This represents Marilyn’s slow death through the use of drugs. The pictures of her fade and you get closer to the right and these mimic her fading into death. The darker shaded ones may represent the darker times in her life when the limelight and media took over and drugs became the only way she felt set apart from everything.
The mix between the colourful side and the black and white side depict Marilyn’s struggle with self-representation and media captivity. Her personality was unknown to the public as it was always artificially created. The left side represents how the public saw her in the way the media personified her, whilst the right side represents the inner struggle of being a young Hollywood starlet; the dark side of a life of luxury.
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