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Golden Marilyn-Andy Warhol-1

Of all Andy Warhol's celebrity subjects, none seem more perfectly emblematic of how the artist perceived and synthesised America than Marilyn Monroe. Warhol saw in Monroe all the promise, beauty, sex symbol, a Hollywood product, the fame and tragedy that 1960s America was capable of realizing. In his Marilyn portraits – which he began shortly after Monroe's death, in August 1962 and taking on the suggestion of Henry Geldzahler - it's impossible to locate what one might call the truth of the subject. Based on Warhol's painting Gold Marilyn Monroe, which belongs to the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Every Saturday night and Sunday morning, the young Andrew Warhola and his mother made a 3 mile walk to Saint John Chrysostom church, a small Byzantine Catholic church. In the church he saw the iconostasis, which was a grid with religious pictures, very two dimensional with gold leaf. This is extremely similar to his works of the Marilyn Diptych. Its simplicity in the sense of colors and the iconic quality which comes directly from the Byzantine art.

“ I just see Monroe as just another person. As for whether it's symbolical to paint Monroe in such violent colors: it's beauty, and she's beautiful and if something's beautiful it's pretty colors, that's all. „

Andy Warhol