This is a painting of Marilyn Monroe. It is part of a series of 5 images Warhol painted of Marilyn that had different brightly coloured backgrounds: red, orange, light blue, sage blue, and turquoise. All five were painted in a 40-inch square format. This image’s title was prefixed with the word “shot,” because it was literally shot through with a bullet from a revolver by Dorothy Podber. In 1964 Podber visited Warhol at his studio where 4 of the paintings in the series of 5 were stored against the wall (the turquoise one was not with them). Podber asked Warhol is she could “shoot” them. Thinking she meant to photograph them, he agreed.
I chose this image for several reasons. Personally I have been a fan of Monroe for a long time because she was a complex, and somewhat tragic Hollywood icon. Secondly, portrait paintings are Warhol’s largest body of work and span the longest period of his life up until his death in 1987. He was often commissioned to produce portraits of people later in his career, but Marilyn was one of his earliest portrait subjects and he created her images by his own choice. The Warhol Marilyns are also some of his most iconic images, along with Campbell’s Soup cans. Ask anyone to think of a Warhol image and they are bound to think of either of those two first. Warhol created many images of Marilyn. They were based on a production still from the film Niagara, which he cropped to feature just her head. The day after her death he visited various movie memorabilia shops in New York looking for just the right image of Marilyn to use. Warhol was inspired to create images of Marilyn in order to commemorate her. Warhol created the paintings by using silkscreens of the photograph and then adding bright colours. This is a technique he continued to use for his portraiture for the rest of his career. After Marilyn followed more portraits of beautiful, famous women, including Elizabeth Taylor and Jackie Kennedy. Although there were variations, Marilyn seems to be a template of how Warhol would portray beautiful women in portraiture throughout his career: The background would be bright, the skin tone neutral (toned down from Marilyn’s pink) the hair a solid block of colour, the lips bright red, and the eyes often emphasised with a bright blue (Joan Collins, 1985; Lana Turner, 1985; Jerry Hall, 1984; Jane Fonda, 1982; Debbie Harry, 1980).
The Marilyn series of images combines Warhol’s obsessions with celebrity and death by celebrating a Hollywood star after she died. The Shot Marilyn Series has a double impact as far as death is concerned as it involved a woman coming to Warhol’s studio and shooting his works of art. This would later be almost repeated when Valerie Solanas came to Warhol’s studio four years later in 1968, only this time she shot the artist himself.
Roy Lichtenstein was a contemporary pop artist of Warhol’s, and like Warhol, he often depicted women’s heads and faces as his subjects, filling the frame with their face. His subjects though were taken from comic strips, and so were fictional people. But the subjects were depicted in a similar way to that of Warhol’s: celebrating images from pop culture using bright colours and bold outlines. He employed Ben-Day dots to make his paintings look like prints, rather than utilising printing techniques as Warhol did.
However, as the art world changed, Warhol seemed out of step with contemporary art as he continued to create his celebrity portraits for commissions. Warhol remained commercial in a time when movements such as Minimalism and Conceptual Art were concerning themselves with politically charged issues and moving away from traditional forms of art such as paintings. However, today Warhol’s portraits can be seen to be more relevant than ever. In The Telegraph Richard Dorment comments on the Marilyn images of a Tate Modern exhibition on Warhol in 2002: “In the portraits of Elizabeth Taylor and Monroe, he recognised and recorded the spiritual vacuum that lies behind America’s desperate fascination with celebrity and physical perfection