Study for Warhol Marilyn, 1973, presents three large panels with Andy Warhol’s iconic screenprinted representation of Marilyn Monroe gridded across the surfaces. The work repeats these multiples in a variety of arrangements: at the right, Marilyn is repeated twenty-five times in black and white; at center, she’s in yellow and pink against a teal ground, again twenty-five times; and at left, there is just one Marilyn, floating in metallic gold like a Byzantine icon. At first glance, Study for Warhol Marilyn appears like any other Warhol. But is it?

 

Sturtevant created Study for Warhol Marilyn concurrent to her 1973 exhibition, Sturtevant: Studies for Warhol’s Marilyns, Beuys’ Actions and Objects, Duchamp’s etc. Including Film, at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York. Sturtevant, who preferred to be known by her (ex-husband’s) surname, was a controversial figure in New York art world of the 1960s and 1970s, as her practice—creating works that are near-copies of other artists’ work—bruised egos and raised wider questions of the importance of originality and creative genius in art, ideas inherited from the Italian Renaissance that still held merit in mid-20^th century art discourse. 

“I decided to find the original Hollywood still, one chance in a million and I found it. I took it to Andy’s silkscreen man and it was perfect. A Warhol screen from my photo which was his photo.”
—Sturtevant

Sturtevant’s practice centers on her ability to embody the mannerisms and techniques of other artists; she is interested in performing the identity of the artist-as-celebrity, and works such as Study for Warhol Marilyn are the products of these performances.ⁱ Her choice to include the “original” artist’s name in her titles—Warhol Marilyn, Warhol Flowers, etc.—clue the viewer into the fact that performing the “original” artist’s persona is part of the work at hand; Sturtevant is not a cheap copyist, trying to pass off the work of another artist as her own. Peter Eleey articulates this well, in describing Sturtevant’s Rainer’s Three Seascapes, 1967, based on choreographer Yvonne Rainer’s work: one cannot “’re-perform’ a dance—you just dance it.”ⁱⁱ Sturtevant’s work characterizes an artist’s process as choreography that can be embodied and performed again and again.ⁱⁱⁱ

 

Warhol, whose celebrity persona as king of The Factory was part and parcel with the rest of his art practice, was one of Sturtevant’s first subjects. In 1965, Sturtevant approached Warhol asking if she could have one of the silkscreens used in his 1962 Marilyn series, but his assistant couldn’t find it anywhere.^iv Sturtevant recounts her next steps in a tone that mimics Warhol’s own wandering speech pattern: “I decided to find the original Hollywood still, one chance in a million and I found it. I took it to Andy’s silkscreen man and it was perfect. A Warhol screen from my photo which was his photo.”^v

 

Sturtevant’s delineation of events here is telling. Not only does she speak the story as if she were Warhol, but she explains how she followed Warhol’s process: just like Warhol in 1962, Sturtevant in 1965 went through the “one chance in a million” artistic process of finding the original still, and bringing it to a particular silkscreen manufacturer. After this process, Sturtevant’s photo “was his photo;” the verb signifying that the two images are one and the same. If the sourcing of the silkscreen for Study for Warhol Marilyn thus follows the exact same process as that for Warhol’s own Marilyn works, then the only difference, really, is that one work is made by Sturtevant’s hand, and the other, Warhol’s, a few years apart. Sturtevant’s work asks, is the identity of that artist’s hand in that moment in time really so significant?

 

Indeed, Study for Warhol Marilyn is compositionally unique from any of Warhol’s known silkscreens of Marilyn Monroe. According to the artist’s catalogue raisonné, he never created a triptych of Marilyns; only diptychs, and single canvas works.^vi Study for Warhol Marilyn, then, seems to pull from multiple Warhol sources, creating a visual product that appears as if it is a Warhol “original,” but in reality, is original to Sturtevant herself.

 

Study for Warhol Marilyn combines three of Warhol’s Marilyn compositions. The left, gold panel recreates the composition of Warhol’s Gold Marilyn Monroe, 1962, Museum of Modern Art, New York.^vii The center and right repetitions of 5x5 grids of Marilyns recall Marilyn Diptych, 1962, Tate Modern, though Sturtevant exchanges Warhol’s orange at center for a teal reminiscent of works such as Four Marilyns, 1962, Sonnabend Collection. Further, the particularity of silkscreen as a medium allows for further variation, revealing to the viewer that Study for Warhol Marilyn is its own unique production. The difference is perhaps most evident when one compares the black and white panel of Study with that of Marilyn Diptych. While Sturtevant has applied more ink in the second column of Marilyns, resulting in the iconic, darker impression seen in Marilyn Diptych, the “one in a million chance” of how that ink pools and pulls through the screen leaves a level of variation—originality, perhaps—that neither Sturtevant nor Warhol can perfectly control.^viii

 “See, in the 60s, there was the big bang of pop art. But pop only dealt with surface. I started asking questions about what lay beneath the surface. What is the understructure of art? What is the power of art?”
—Sturtevant

Two years before Study for Warhol Marilyn, Sturtevant wrote a letter with a list of what her art was not doing to dealer Reinhard Onnasch: “I’m not in the process of celebrating process / I am not making copies / I am not making imitations… / I am not interested in being a ‘Great Artist’ / That’s real medieval thinking.”^ix The idea of the “Great Artist,” rather than being “medieval” thinking, actually dates to the Italian Renaissance, with Giorgio Vasari’s influential Lives of the Most Excellent Artists, Sculptors, and Architects, 1550, a series of biographies of great Italian artists. Vasari’s work created a canon of great men of art history, and this art historical model of the cult of artistic genius carried on into the 20^th century, with the personas of men like Warhol, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning dominating the artistic conversation. Ironically, Sturtevant’s approach to art is medieval, as, like medieval artists, her work emphasizes the importance of widespread beliefs and icons on a culture’s visual expression, rather than over-glorifying the impact of an individual artist’s hand.^x

“… Sturtevant prompted the viewer to question whether originality is a function of style or characteristic imagery, and to ask who says so, and why.”
—Patricia Lee

Study for Warhol Marilyn dates to the year before Sturtevant took a ten-year hiatus from the art world, returning in the mid-1980s to newfound appreciation as the long-lost forebearer of the Pictures Generation Appropriationists, including Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and Cindy Sherman. However, Sturtevant herself never accepted this ancestral designation.^xi To her, the artistic problem was about a concept larger than the loss of originality. In her words, “I was about the power of thought;” meaning, how our thoughts about what makes an artwork original, and how that work should be made, shape our perceptions of authentic work.^xii

 

As a result, the viewer’s thought process is central to the success of her work: Study for Warhol Marilyn works because the viewer thinks it is a Warhol, until realizing that, actually, it’s a Sturtevant.^xiii This cognitive shift is Sturtevant’s conceptual key. What happens in the middle of this double-looking? What happens between the first glance, full of cultural assumptions and artistic ideals, and the second, sobered stare? As Patricia Lee writes, “[with Sturtevant] you think you know what you are seeing, and have seen it all before, but what does one miss by relying on assumed knowledge?”^xiv The missing link is “the power of thought” Sturtevant is all about.

 

 

ⁱ Patricia Lee, Sturtevant: Warhol Marilyn, London, 2016, p. 71-72.

ⁱⁱ Peter Eleey, quoted in Lee, 71.

ⁱⁱⁱ Lee, 71.

^iv Lee, 19.

^v Sturtevant, quoted in Lee, 20.

^viAndy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné vol. 1: Paintings and Sculpture, 1961-1963., cat. rais., Georg Frei and Neil Printz, eds., Phaidon, 2002, no. 248-285.

^vii Ibid., cat no. 248.

^viii Lee, 50.

^ix Sturtevant [1971], quoted in Peter Eeley, ed., Sturtevant: Double Trouble, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2014, p. 54.

^x See Sherry C.M. Lindquist and Stephen Perkinson, “Artistic Identity in the Late Middle Ages: Foreword,” Gesta, vol. 41, no. 1, 2002, online; Lee, 51, 54.

^xi Lee, 18.

^xii Sturtevant, quoted in Ivan Ogilvie, “Sturtevant: Leaps Jumps and Bumps” [video], NOWNESS, Jul. 25, 2013, online.

^xiii Sturtevant, quoted in Lee, 31.

^xiv Lee, 49.