The Great American Life and Death of Andy Warhol</head>

The Death of Glamour

In his paintings of Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy, Warhol produced some of the most potentially emotive work of his career. There can be no doubt that Warhol must have anticipated the highly charged reactions to a choice of imagery showing the major figures who had touched the lives of the American public, whose real-life tragedies as portrayed by the media had stirred the emotions of all those who had "known" them.

Marilyn
His paintings of Marilyn, "adapted" from a famous publicity still, automatically arouse in the viewer a host of associations concerning Marilyn's private life which had been delegated public property since her rise to stardom.

Tales of her marriages, multiple abortions, drug dependency, her illicit sexual relationships with political leaders of the Kennedy empire and the unsolved mystery of events surrounding her sudden death continue to haunt the viewer when confronted with Marilyn's image.

Publicity still of Marilyn, marked out for
reproduction by Warhol.© 58

©	Adaptation of a Warhol panel © 16

Jackie
Warhol's Jackie series was painted shortly after the assassination of her husband. In her role as first lady, she had become the ideal model of American womanhood and in the advent of the President's death she assumed the role of the tragic queen.
The actual events surrounding Jack Kennedy's death had been repeated ad infinitum on television and on the front page of every media publication, and the image of Jackie in mourning had become the focus of the aftermath of this national tragedy.

That these portraits were in fact deep meditations on Warhol's part on the multi-dimensional existence of the "star" has been convincingly put forward by the critics. The theory that Warhol has put into question the ontological status of the "plastic" idol in our society, that he has set up an investigation into the "image"of the celebrity makes critical sense when we consider the paintings of Marilyn entitled "Marilyn Diptych" and "Gold Marilyn" and his painting of Jackie entitled "The Week that was", especially when we reconsider Warhol's own self-cultivated celebrity persona, and the ironic comment that he seems to have made on the Hollywood status, in his creation of his own instant Superstars.

MARILYN

JACKIE

Created by Joanne Patterson
Last Updated: 11 June 1997
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