One photo, a screen, fifty pulls

Every one of the fifty faces in this work comes from a single photograph. Not fifty photos, not a sitting, not a range of moods, one image, used over and over. It is a publicity still (a posed promotional photo a film studio puts out to advertise a movie) made in 1953 for the film noir Niagara, the thriller that gave Monroe top billing and pushed her into full stardom. The photographer was Gene Kornman, a Hollywood studio cameraman. Warhol cropped the still tight, throwing away the rest of it and keeping only the head: the hair, the heavy-lidded eyes with their shadow, the parted lips. What he kept was not really a face so much as a mask, the glamour image at its most reducible, the few features that say “Marilyn” and nothing else.

The method is the whole point. The image is not painted. It is silkscreened, and that word needs unpacking. A silkscreen (or screenprint) is a stencil printing process: you take a fine mesh screen, block out the parts that should stay blank, and push ink through the open mesh onto whatever lies beneath, so the ink prints in the shape of the open areas. Warhol used a photographic version of this. As he described it himself: “you pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue.” The photograph becomes the stencil. Then you press the screen onto the canvas, squeegee ink through it, lift it, move it over, and pull again. Same image, again and again, by hand but by machine logic, as fast as you can reposition the screen.

So here is how the diptych was built. Warhol took two large canvases. On the left one he first laid down blocks of bright acrylic color by hand, the patches of yellow for hair, pink for skin, red for the mouth, then printed the black photographic image on top in a grid, twenty-five times, five rows of five. On the right canvas he printed the same image, the same twenty-five times, but in black ink alone, no color underneath. That is the entire work: one photograph, one screen, fifty pulls across two panels. The hand that made it is barely a painter’s hand at all. It is a printer’s.

And because it is printing, it goes wrong, on purpose. Roll a screen by hand fifty times and the ink loads up and runs out; the screen lands a hair off-center; an impression clogs solid or starves to a ghost. Warhol did not fix any of this. He let the registration drift and the ink thin and the faces clog or fade, so that the “same” image is in fact slightly different every single time, never once a clean copy. Two paintings worth of the same dead movie star, reproduced by a process that quietly fails. That failure is not a flaw in the work. It is most of what the work is about.