Marilyn Diptych

The subtractive test meets a work whose argument is that its units are interchangeable. Remove a column of heads and the grid is four by five; the repetition still says what it says, and nothing in the image tells why twenty-five rather than twenty or thirty. That permission is real and is charged. But the large parts are compelled. Take away the black panel and what remains is a gaudy sheet of publicity, the death gone; take away the colour panel and what remains is decay with nothing to decay from. Take away the fading at the right and the passage from presence to absence stops before it ends; take away the misregistration and the colour becomes a picture of a face rather than a mask laid on one. Compelled at the level of the halves and the gradient, permitted at the level of the count.

Score: 8.0 / 10

What the painting brings into the open can be stated, and it holds. A person who becomes an image is consumed by its reproduction: fifty Marilyns, and no Marilyn. Celebrity is a commodity made by repetition, the face supplied like goods, the colour applied like make-up to a mask that is the same in every cell. The image survives the woman and goes on circulating; repetition, which made her, also drains her, and the right panel shows the draining in black. Made while the death was news, it shows how the mass image takes a death in: as more images, and as fading. That is an articulated condition of the century, not a mood. How far the death belongs to the work rather than to its date is open, and the person disclosed is a surface by design; the gate is met with a tenth to spare.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The left panel does not elevate and is not meant to: its brilliance is a poster’s. The right panel rises once, and gravely. The black heads clot and smear, some nearly drowned, and toward the right edge they thin out to ghosts, so that the eye reading across the whole passes from glare to dark to almost nothing. Seen across a room at nearly six square metres, the passage carries a real dread, cold and impersonal, the face withdrawing while the grid goes on without it. That is a summit, and it is one: the effect is a single movement read once, and the near view, all flat ink, offers little further rising. Low frequency is what holds the axis.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Here the archetype is built, not quoted. The diptych is the form of the altar wings and the devotional pair; the face repeated in rows is the votive image and the icon, the likeness multiplied for the faithful; the halves are life and death, colour and black, a vanitas laid out as structure. The particular stays particular: one film actress, one publicity still of 1953, the colours of a studio portrait. The archetype carries the work’s single movement, from the gaudy living mask to the fading black ghosts, the passage of the goddess into death. What holds it below the gate: the sacred is present as structure but emptied, the icon as commodity, and the work’s sense is that the archetype no longer holds what it held; and whether the pairing of the panels was the first conception is not settled.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The inheritance in 1962 was painting as the trace of a hand and a self, still dominant in New York and already questioned by Johns, Rauschenberg and Lichtenstein. The departure: a found photograph transferred to canvas by a commercial process, printed fifty times, with the process’s failures left to stand as the painting. The hand withdraws into the squeegee, the grid replaces composition, a publicity still replaces invention: the turn is from the painter as subject to the painter as process. Each element had a precedent close at hand, in Johns’s given image, Rauschenberg’s photographic transfers and Lichtenstein’s borrowed commercial images of 1961. The stake was real: a successful commercial illustrator whose standing as a painter was not granted risked being read as decoration or as cynicism. The turn is complete; its first steps were shared.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows. The grid is the knowledge of mass production: the face supplied in units, each the same and different only where the process falters. The silkscreen is the knowledge of the photograph as public property: no likeness made, a likeness reproduced. The out-of-register colour is the knowledge of the mask: lips and eyelids slip off the face they paint. The two panels are the knowledge of death in the image: one screen, one half dressed and one left to fade. A single Marilyn knows the icon and not the consumption; a painted Marilyn knows a likeness and not a product. Held below the top because the count is permitted rather than compelled, and the movement is legible only across the whole, so that the parts, studied, say less than the sum.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Evidence over promise: sixty-four years of return, and the painting still divides its readers. Is it cool or mourning, complicit or critical, a celebration of the commodity or an exposure of it? Thomas Crow’s “Saturday Disasters” (1987) read the Marilyns as a public mourning, a shadow of the death pictures; Hal Foster’s “Death in America” (1996) read the repetition as trauma, screening and puncturing at once; Arthur Danto made Warhol the end of a history of art; others read the commercial and the queer camp in the same images. The black panel sustains looking: no two heads fail alike. Held below the top because the surface yields less to close looking than to argument, and much of the literature concerns Warhol and the series rather than this object.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Published, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the painting reorganised what a painting could be made of and how, the photographic image transferred mechanically, repetition as composition, the celebrity and the commodity as subject, the hand replaced by a process whose errors are the expression; it is the fullest single statement of the Marilyns of 1962. The discount: the reach belongs to that year’s silkscreens together, the Marilyns, the soup cans, the Elvises and the disasters, more than to this object, and the move to silkscreen was shared that year with Rauschenberg. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: among the widest of any painting of its decade, through Richter’s photo paintings and Polke’s raster pictures within a year or two, the Pictures Generation and the appropriation art of the 1970s and 1980s, and the celebrity image as the common material of later art, advertising and design.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Survival of what makes the work, the image, weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: whole and legible; the fading of the right panel is the work’s own and is not decay. The subject, which might have fixed it to 1962, has outlived its moment: Monroe is more an emblem now than then, and the painting’s sense of the image outliving the person has been confirmed by its own survival. Presence: at Tate since 1980, and among the most reproduced paintings of the century. Fabric: acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas, young materials whose long behaviour is not shown, and the matte, unvarnished ink is vulnerable to abrasion and cleaning. Over sixty-four years the form is whole and the presence wide; the untested fabric holds the figure a step below the widest.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Judged to the same anchors as every medium, as command of silkscreen over a hand-painted ground at this scale. What is commanded: the ink load, varied across the black panel from clotted to starved, so that the gradient from presence to absence reads; the colour areas laid under the screen in flat, chosen tones and set off register by design; the grid held regular enough to read as production and irregular enough to show its making. The making is load-bearing, since the meaning lives in the accidents of the screen and they are governed. What holds it lower: the means are few and impersonal by choice, the drawing is a photograph, the colour lies in flat patches, and the command is of a process’s behaviour rather than of a range of marks. How much of the black panel’s gradient was intended is not known.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: a heavily painted head at the left, orange ground, yellow hair, red mouth, and a ghost at the far right of the black panel where the face has nearly gone. They obey one law: the same screen pulled across a surface, with more or less ink, over more or less colour. Every head is that one event at a different load on a different ground; there is no second kind of mark, no drawn passage, no image that is not the screen. The law covers a wide range, saturated colour to bare ground, presence to absence, glamour to death, and it holds as one work two panels that could have been two. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory is still narrow: one face, one screen, one grid, two grounds.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The work holds more orders than an emblem or an abstract field: a person, one actress and her face; the mass media and the industry of celebrity; commerce, the face supplied like a product; death, in the date of the making and in the black panel; the sacred, in the diptych and the icon, present as form and emptied; and the viewer’s own consumption of images, since the grid gives the face as it was met, many times and never once. These are integrated: person, product, icon and death are one image seen fifty ways. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the family, labour beyond the process, the state, the natural order, history beyond the moment of the news, any world around the face. The figure describes the form.

Score: 7.0 / 10