Poster, Andy Warhol, Marilyn in Black and White

Dimensions: 50 x 70 cm

Shortly after Marilyn Monroe's tragic death in August 1962, Andy Warhol created 20 silkscreen paintings based on a publicity photograph of Monroe for the 1953 film Niagara. The paintings merge two motifs that Warhol became interested in throughout his life - celebrities and tragedies. By combining the aesthetics of newspaper printing with religious iconography, the work becomes a fantastic tribute to one of Hollywood's most fascinating icons while critically describing the emptiness of contemporary popular and mass media culture. He himself believed that the image of Marilyn was related to a theme of death. In parallel with the Marilyn works, he worked on the painting "129 DIE IN JET" whose motif was a front page of the daily newspaper New York Mirror. He told the art magazine ARTnews in 1963: "I realized that everything I did was about death."

The motif on this poster is a work of art in the collection of Moderna Museet.

Item no.: MOM50

© 2018 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/ARS, New York/Copyright. NM 5885 Moderna Museet, Sweden.