SYNONYMS ICONOGRAPHER MOVIE
SYNONYMS ICONOGRAPHER SERIES

“He first showed us the black Marilyns, and several pictures later the colored one appeared. “He seemed shy and it took a bit of coaxing before he showed us everything,” Tremaine later recalled. The still-emerging artist didn’t have a dealer yet, and was selling artworks himself. Tremaine and her husband, Burton, visited Warhol’s studio on Lexington Avenue in 1962. It was collector and art director Emily Hall Tremaine’s idea. This wasn’t the only time he elevated Monroe to religious icon status-his Gold Marilyn (1962) from the same year envelops a small silkscreened portrait of her in a suffocating halo of metallic gold paint.īut Warhol didn’t conceive of this now-revered diptych as a pair. The diptych format winks at traditional Christian iconography, but instead of depicting the Holy Trinity or a Madonna with Child, Warhol portrays an idolized celebrity. Her face repeats a dizzying 50 times across two panels-one brightly colored in yellow, pink, and blue, and the other in black silhouette over silver. Warhol started the largest of his early Monroe artworks, Marilyn Diptych (1962), in the months after she died. Photo: © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych (1962) wasn’t originally conceived as a pairĪndy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych (1962). One became a pornography mogul and the other a Pop art legend but she (and her estate) gained nothing from it, adding to the general tragedy of Marilyn Monroe that hers was a world of men who profited off her appearance. In effect, Hefner and Warhol chose different images of Monroe wearing the same low-cut dress to make themselves famous-yet, unsurprisingly, paid her nothing.

She wore this black dress with a plunging neckline and white sailor collar to the 1952 Miss America pageant, and again the following year when posing for Korman’s publicity shots for Niagara.

Monroe is notorious for the white halter dress she wore in The Seven Year Itch (1955) that floated up when she stood above a drafty subway grate, but she also donned a distinctively collared halter dress for at least two high-profile appearances. She graced the cover too, in a photo of her waving at crowds from the back seat of a convertible as part of the parade for the 1952 Miss America beauty pageant in Atlantic City. When magazine publisher Hugh Hefner printed the debut issue of Playboy in late 1953, he famously ran a nude Marilyn centerfold bought from a pinup photographer (who took it back when the actor was strapped for cash). Photo: Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images. Late Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner’s personal copy of the first Playboy issue featuring Marilyn Monroe. If Marilyn’s collar looks familiar, you may have seen it on the first cover of Playboy You’ve probably seen Warhol’s Marilyns everywhere and on repeat, but here are three things you might not know about these candy-colored portraits. Warhol and Monroe have been synonymous ever since, especially since the artist’s earliest Marilyn silkscreens helped launch his success when they starred in his first major New York solo show, at New York’s Stable Gallery in November 1962. He then silkscreened the colors and silhouette slightly off-kilter, highlighting the imperfections of this commercial medium and packaging Monroe as a product (no different than a can of soup). Warhol cropped the photograph, closing in tightly around Monroe’s signature look of blonde curls, dark eyebrows, sultry lips, and a beauty mark. “You get the same image, slightly different each time.

“When Marilyn Monroe happened to die that month, I got the idea to make screens of her beautiful face - the first Marilyns ,” Warhol said. The Pop artist had just started making silkscreens that month, and the tragic blonde celebrity seemed like the ideal subject. In August 1962, the same month that Monroe died of a sleeping pill overdose, Warhol sorted through his collection of photos of her and picked the publicity shot for Niagara taken by 20th Century Fox photographer Gene Korman (aka Eugene Kornman).

SYNONYMS ICONOGRAPHER SERIES

With the camera framing her face like a portrait, de Armas could almost be posing for Monroe’s publicity shot for the film-the one now far better known for its cameo in a Pop series by Andy Warhol. “Take me, take me in your arms,” Ana de Armas croons seductively as Monroe, her platinum hair coiffed to mimic the iconic bombshell.

SYNONYMS ICONOGRAPHER MOVIE

Around a third of the way into Blonde, the Netflix movie about Marilyn Monroe released last month, a graphic ménage à trois fades into a trailer for the actor’s 1953 film, Niagara.

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