Andy Warhol American, 1928-1987
Framed: 100 x 100 cm / 39.4" x 39.4" in
Conservation framed in perspex
Marilyn (after F&S II.24) is a screenprint on museum board published by Sunday B. Morning, presented here in the silver colourway - the most formally austere and psychologically complex variant in the ten-print Marilyn suite, and the one that most directly confronts the mythology of Monroe's image with the language of loss.
The image is based on Warhol's 1967 Marilyn suite - catalogued as Feldman & Schellmann II.22-31 - one of the defining achievements of Pop Art printmaking. Warhol sourced the image from a publicity photograph of Marilyn Monroe taken for the 1953 film Niagara - a photograph he first used in 1962, in the immediate aftermath of her death, transforming grief and celebrity into a visual language of mechanical repetition that has never been surpassed. Where the pink and orange colourways project heat, vitality, and the full force of Monroe's glamour, the silver variant drains the image of warmth - rendering the same face in cool metallic tones that situate the work squarely within Warhol's broader preoccupation with death, surfaces, and the ghostly persistence of the celebrity image beyond the body that produced it. Silver was Warhol's signature colour - the colour of The Factory's walls, of aluminium foil, of the modern world's reflective indifference - and its application to Monroe's portrait is among the most considered chromatic decisions in the entire suite.
The Sunday B. Morning project began as a direct collaboration with Warhol, who provided original photo negatives and colour codes to two anonymous Belgian associates for the production of new editions. The collaboration subsequently became contested - Warhol later had a change of heart regarding the arrangement - and Sunday B. Morning continued producing prints independently after the split. The project has since occupied a unique and much-debated position in the Warhol market: the prints are noted in the Feldman & Schellmann Catalogue Raisonné, produced from Warhol's own original negatives, and remain among the most widely collected Warhol-related works on the market. Warhol himself signed some early impressions with the characteristically ironic inscription "This is not by me. Andy Warhol" - arguably his most precise single statement on authorship and mechanical reproduction.
Current blue stamp editions are printed on museum board using archival inks. Each impression bears the blue ink stamps Published by Sunday B. Morning and Fill in your own signature on the verso, and is accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity issued by Sunday B. Morning.
Literature
Feldman, F. & Schellmann, J. Andy Warhol Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné 1962-1987, 4th ed. New York: D.A.P., 2003, F&S II.31 (related original 1967 screenprint on which this edition is based)- X
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Marilyn (Castelli Graphics Invitation)Andy Warhol, Marilyn (Castelli Graphics Invitation), 1981Sold10,000.00 -
Marilyn (11.31) – Sunday B. Morning Edition (Pink)Andy Warhol, Marilyn (11.31) – Sunday B. Morning Edition (Pink)Sold2,000.00 -
Marilyn (11.23) – Sunday B. Morning Edition (Mint)Andy Warhol, Marilyn (11.23) – Sunday B. Morning Edition (Mint)Sold2,000.00
