On the occasion of Marilyn Monroe’s suicide in August 1962, Warhol used this image for his screenprinting. It was a publicity shot by Gene Korman for the film Niagara, made in 1953.
Andy Warhol (1928-1987) was a key figure in Pop Art, an art movement that emerged in America and elsewhere in the 1950s to become prominent over the next two decades.
Warhol was fascinated with morbid concepts. Sometimes, however, the results are astonishingly beautiful, such as the resonating, brilliantly colored images of Marilyn Monroe.
In August 62 I started doing silkscreens. I wanted something stronger that gave more of an assembly line effect. With silkscreening 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. That way you get the same image, slightly different each time. It was all so simple quick and chancy. I was thrilled with it. When Marilyn Monroe happened to die that month, I got the idea to make screens of her beautiful face the first Marilyns.
Using photo-stencils in screen-printing, Warhol uses photographic images for his screenprints. The screen is prepared using a photographic process, and then different color inks are printed using a rubber squeegee to press the paint onto the painting through the screen.
copy: http://www.webexhibits.org/colorart/marilyns.html
