 |
An icon of twentieth-century pop art, Warhol began work on the famous
portraits of Marilyn Monroe in 1962. He used the medium of silkscreen
printing (where fabric is stretched over a frame to hold stencil designs
and carry ink onto the paper) to produce iconic portraits, often with
repeated imagery of celebrities such as Elvis Presley, Liz Taylor or
Marilyn Monroe herself. These silk screens were produced circa 1970
by Warhol's studio, the Factory in New York, who took the screens to
Belgium and printed more from them, extending the earlier edition that
was signed by Warhol and limited to only 250 prints. These slightly
later silk screens are stamped on the verso "Sunday B. Morning"
and "Add your own signature here". This series of prints was
produced in ten colour schemes.
The celebrated critic Robert Hughes writes on Warhol's fascination with
serial images, which he repeats throughout his work like a mantra invoking
the commodification of life and love, politics and religion.
'It all flowed from one central insight: that in a culture glutted with
information, where most people experience most things at second or third
hand through TV and print, through images that become banal and disassociated
by being repeated again and again and again, there is a role for affectless
art. You no longer need to be hot and full of feeling. You can be supercool,
like a slightly frosted mirror…. . Warhol extended it by using
silk screen, and not bothering to clean up the imperfections of the
print: those slips of the screen, uneven inkings of the roller, and
general graininess. What they suggested was not the humanizing touch
of the hand but the pervasiveness of routine error and of entropy…' (Robert Hughes, American Visions.)
|
|
