Color on the left, the right side fading to nothing

The first surprise is the size. People who know the image from postcards expect something small; in the room it is large, about six and three-quarter feet tall and nine and a half feet wide (the two panels joined run over nine feet across), a wall of a picture. The second thing that registers is that it is two canvases, set edge to edge, with a clear seam down the middle, and that the two halves are doing opposite things. The whole work hinges on that split, and the two sides are best read one at a time.

The left panel is in color, and the color is hot and flat and slightly off. The hair is a single block of yellow, the face a flush of pink, the mouth a slash of red, the eyelids a band of turquoise, each laid down as a patch rather than a modeled, shadowed tone. And the color does not quite line up with the black face printed over it. The yellow of the hair runs past where the hair is; the red lipstick sits a fraction off the lips; the turquoise floats near, but not exactly on, the eyes. This is off-register printing left visible: color and image slightly misaligned, the way a cheaply printed comic or a smeared magazine ad goes a touch out of true. It reads as garish, mechanical, advertised, the look of mass print, not the look of a portrait.

Across the seam, on the right panel, the color is simply gone. It is black-and-white, the same face printed in black ink on bare canvas, and as the eye travels across it the printing degrades. Some faces are over-inked, clogged into dark blots where the features disappear. Others are starved, the ink thinning out, the face breaking up, growing fainter and fainter until, toward the far right edge, the last impressions all but dissolve into blank canvas. A recognizable face thins into a grey smudge and then into almost nothing. The machine is running out.

It is hard not to read this. The bright, alive, public Marilyn on the left; the same face draining away to nothing on the right. Color as life, fade as death; glamour on one side, oblivion on the other. This is the most widely held reading of the diptych, and it is a fair one. But it is a reading, not a stated program. Warhol did not title the panels “life” and “death,” and the critic David Bourdon, who knew him, noted that Warhol never assigned a definitive meaning to the relationship between the two halves. The fade is plainly there on the canvas; what it means is left for you, and Warhol kept his own answer to himself.

The layout, across both panels, is fifty faces in even rows and columns, twenty-five a side, every one the same cropped Kornman still. The arrangement is not a gallery of portraits but a grid, the regular cells of a contact sheet, a strip of film frames, rows of product on a shelf. And once it reads as a grid, the argument it’s making comes through without a word: a star is a quantity, an image stamped out by the million, identical units. The thing that makes Marilyn Marilyn, the unrepeatable person, is exactly what the repetition strips away. One face is a glamour shot; fifty is a product run, and the longer you look the emptier each one gets. That emptiness is the point, and Warhol said it out loud.