A star dies, and a printmaker reaches for her photograph

On 5 August 1962, Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) was found dead in her Los Angeles home. She was thirty-six, and at that moment the most famous face in the world. Within weeks, a thirty-three-year-old New York artist named Andy Warhol (1928–1987) was making picture after picture of that face. The Marilyn Diptych comes straight out of those weeks. It is not a memorial in the ordinary sense; it is something stranger. Warhol had already spent that year doing the thing that explains it.

Warhol had spent the late 1950s as a wildly successful commercial illustrator, drawing shoes and ad work for magazines, and he carried the habits of advertising straight into his fine art. By 1962 he had hit on his method and his subjects at once. That spring he showed thirty-two paintings of Campbell’s Soup cans, one for each flavor, in a Los Angeles gallery, lining them up like cans on a grocery shelf. He was painting dollar bills, Coca-Cola bottles, the plain mass-produced stuff of American consumer life, and treating each one with the flat, deadpan attention you’d give a product, not a still life. The question hanging over all of it was simple and rude: what happens when you make a painting out of the most common, machine-made, advertised things in the country?

And then Monroe died, and Warhol saw that a famous person was one more of those things. A movie star, in 1962, was not so different from a soup can: a brand, a package, an image manufactured and reproduced by the millions to be consumed. So he treated her exactly as he had been treating the cans. He did not invent a new image of her, did not sketch her from memory, did not reach for anything private. He went and found an existing photograph, the public, pre-packaged one, and set about reproducing it. The grief, if it is grief, is buried under a process that looks like an assembly line. That is the picture: a star turned into a product the week she stopped being a person. Whether that is a cold indictment of how a culture consumed Monroe, or Warhol coolly doing the same thing himself the week she died, is a question critics have never settled; the diptych refuses to say which, and that refusal is part of why it still unsettles.