The Marilyn Diptych (1962) is a silkscreen painting by American pop artist Andy Warhol depicting Marilyn Monroe. The piece is one of the artist's most noted works. It is in the collection of the Tate.


Silk-screening was the technique used to create this painting. The twenty-five images on the left are painted in color, the right side is black and white. The painting consists of 50 images.


The work was completed during the weeks after Marilyn Monroe's death in August 1962. The fifty images of the actress are all based on a single publicity photograph from the film Niagara (1953).


It has been suggested that the relation between the left side of the canvas and the right side of the canvas is evocative of the relation between the celebrity's life and death. The work has received praise from writers such as American academic and cultural critic Camille Paglia, who wrote in 2012's Glittering Images lauding how it shows the "multiplicity of meanings" in Monroe's life and legacy.


In a December 2, 2004 article in The Guardian, the painting was named the third most influential piece of modern art in a survey of 500 artists, critics, and others. The artwork was also ranked ninth in the past 1000 years by Kathleen Davenport, Director, Rice University Art Gallery, Houston.


The artwork was bought by art / design show organizer / collector Emily Hall Tremaine out of Warhol's studio in 1962, among several other noted early works by Warhol. This work was sold to the Tate Gallery in 1980. Over the years, Marilyn Diptych has been in numerous exhibitions, including Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky: Pop 1957-67 at Tate Modern, April 27, 2015 - January 10, 2016.

This is a part of the Wikipedia article used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). The full text of the article is here →