From the Tremaines’ wall to the Tate

Here is the work’s life as an object, the provenance (the documented chain of who has owned a work of art, in order, from the artist’s hand to where it sits now). It starts with a detail that is part of the meaning. The two canvases were bought directly from Warhol in 1962, before he had gallery representation, by the American collectors Emily Hall Tremaine and Burton Tremaine, who were among the first serious buyers of his work. By the standard account, the two panels were not conceived from the start as a single picture: it was Emily Tremaine who suggested the two separate canvases, the colored one and the black-and-white one, be shown together as a diptych, and Warhol agreed. (That detail is widely repeated but anecdotal, so hold it as reported rather than documented.) From then on the two were treated as one work, and the life-and-death reading the picture now carries hangs on a pairing that may have been an afterthought.

That pairing also handed the work its name and a whole layer of meaning. A diptych (pronounced “DIP-tik”) is, historically, a two-panel hinged altarpiece, a Christian devotional object, two painted wooden panels that fold together like a book, set up on an altar or carried for private prayer. By calling this work a Diptych and using that sacred two-panel format, Warhol (or the title that stuck to the work) casts Monroe as a modern, secular icon: the repeated face read like a litany of prayers, the gilded star treated as an object of something close to religious devotion. This is criticism, not an artist’s statement, but it is hard to unsee once named, the supermarket and the altar in the same frame.

In 1980, the Tremaines sold the Marilyn Diptych to the Tate Gallery in London (reportedly for around $270,000, a figure from secondary accounts). The Tate record reads, simply, “Purchased 1980,” accession T03093. It was not donated and not bequeathed; the museum bought it. It hangs today at Tate Modern, on the south bank of the Thames, and is one of the most reproduced images in the building, which is its own small joke, a work about the emptiness of reproduction, endlessly reproduced.

And the work’s influence ran exactly along the line it opened. After this, the commodity image became fair game for serious art; the artist could become a brand, a name and a factory rather than a lone hand; and a whole later practice of appropriation, taking an existing photograph or product and re-presenting it as art, traces back through here. The face Warhol screened fifty times is now, half a century on, one of the most familiar images on earth, a picture about a star turned into a product that has itself become a product, sold on mugs and posters and tote bags, which is either the failure of the work’s argument or its final proof.