Lee Patricia - Sturtevant: Warhol Marilyn

One Work is a unique series of books published by Afterall, a Research Centre of University of the Arts London, located at Central Saint Martins. Each book presents a single work of art considered in detail by a single author. The focus of the series is on contemporary art and its aim is to provoke debate about significant moments in arts recent development.

Over the course of more than one hundred books, important works will be presented in a meticulous and generous manner by writers who believe passionately in the originality and significance of the works about which they have chosen to write. Each book contains a comprehensive and detailed formal description of the work, followed by a critical mapping of the aesthetic and cultural context in which it was made and that it has gone on to shape. The changing presentation and reception of the work throughout its existence is also discussed, and each writer stakes a claim on the influence their work has on the making and understanding of other works of art.

The books insist that a single contemporary work of art (in all of its different manifestations), through a unique and radical aesthetic articulation or invention, can affect our understanding of art in general. More than that, these books suggest that a single work of art can literally transform, however modestly, the way we look at and understand the world. In this sense the One Work series, while by no means exhaustive, will eventually become a veritable library of works of art that have made a difference.

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Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous

by Jan Verwoert

Hollis Frampton: (nostalgia)

by Rachel Moore

Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment

by Boris Groys

Richard Prince: Untitled (couple)

by Michael Newman

Joan Jonas: I Want to Live in the Country (And Other Romances)

by Susan Morgan

Mary Heilmann: Save the Last Dance for Me

by Terry R. Myers

Marc Camille Chaimowicz: Celebration? Realife

by Tom Holert

Yvonne Rainer: The Mind is a Muscle

by Catherine Wood

Fischli and Weiss: The Way Things Go

by Jeremy Millar

Andy Warhol: Blow Job

by Peter Gidal

Alighiero e Boetti: Mappa

by Luca Cerizza

Chris Marker: La Jete

by Janet Harbord

Hanne Darboven: Cultural History 18801983

by Dan Adler

Michael Snow: Wavelength

by Elizabeth Legge

Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel

by Amna Malik

Richard Long: A Line Made by Walking

by Dieter Roelstraete

Marcel Duchamp: tant donns

by Julian Jason Haladyn

General Idea: Imagevirus

by Gregg Bordowitz

Dara Birnbaum: Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman

by T.J. Demos

Gordon Matta-Clark: Conical Intersect

by Bruce Jenkins

Jeff Wall: Picture for Women

by David Campany

Jeff Koons: One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank

by Michael Archer

Richard Hamilton: Swingeing London 67 (f)

by Andrew Wilson

Martha Rosler: The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems

by Steve Edwards

Dan Graham: Rock My Religion

by Kodwo Eshun

Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Room Phallis Field

by Jo Applin

Michael Asher: Kunsthalle Bern, 1992

by Anne Rorimer

Hlio Oiticica and Neville DAlmeida: Block-Experiments in Cosmococa program in progress

by Sabeth Buchmann and Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz

Sanja Ivekovi: Triangle

by Ruth Noack

Rodney Graham: Phonokinetoscope

by Shepherd Steiner

Lee Lozano: Dropout Piece

by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer

Philip Guston: The Studio

by Craig Burnett

Thomas Hirschhorn: Deleuze Monument

by Anna Dezeuze

Mike Kelley: Educational Complex

by John Miller

Lee Friedlander: The Little Screens

by Saul Anton

In Warhol Marilyn (1965, ), the face of Marilyn Monroe, one of the most famous Hollywood actresses of the twentieth century, is depicted in what might equally be one of the most well-known portraits in the history of modern art. The silkscreen-and-acrylic painting was composed from a publicity photograph used for the 1953 film Niagara. Bold, colourful strokes of paint float against a background of arresting red, with the photographic image applied in black, wiped with a squeegee through a silkscreen stencil. Monroes hair is denoted by a wide swathe of lemon yellow, her face a porcine pink. Three sky-blue shapes suffice to indicate cosmetic eyeshadow and a halter-neck strap. The red of the background is also put to use as an imprecise dash of lipstick. Striking a balance between the mechanical properties of the appropriated photographic image and its gestural painted elements, Sturtevants Warhol Marilyn presents an image as famous as the silver screen icon it depicts; an image that is a heavily coded icon of Pop art, and more specifically of Andy Warhol.

Warhol took up the portrait soon after Monroe was found dead, on 5 August 1962, from an overdose of pills. He would gain notoriety in the early 1960s for his serial images of celebrities such as Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Jackie Kennedy, as well as for his depictions of consumer products, from Campbells Soup Cans (1962) to Brillo Boxes (1964), which drew upon a reservoir of popular culture, advertising and media imagery and exposed the reification of identity endemic in post-War American society. Warhol incorporated elements of chance and speed of execution into his screen-printing method: a work was produced in stages, with the figurative elements put down before the painted ground, and occasionally finished with over-painting by hand.

One might mistakenly identify Warhol Marilyn as one of the silkscreen portraits produced by Warhol more than fifty times between August 1962 and September 1964.

Warhols comment presages the encounter with the picture here in question. Warhol Marilyn, from 1965, and pictured on the cover of this book, is not a Warhol but a Sturtevant. It is accompanied by other screen-printed paintings (

In my own experience of works of works by Sturtevant, I have been impressed by their presence. Not only do they resemble the works from which they were made, they also project a sense of the time from which they hail. Stella Arbeit Macht Frei (1989, The sheer good fortune of finding the same kind of black enamel paint that Stella had used could not have been planned, as she described in the 2007 performance-lecture:

When doing the black Stellas,

the chemistry of the paint had

been changed, giving a different

quality to the work.

It was resolved by finding one of

those jammed Little Italy stores.

Not because they had old black paint,

but rather because the owner had a

Brooklyn friend

who had a basement full of old

black paint.

But that is a throw of the dice.

The use of black paint would seem to be the most mechanical aspect of making her Stella works, yet its location and employ were not so straightforward. The chance acquisition of a particular vintage of black paint that was over two decades old was critical to getting the works right.