Andy Warhol by Arthur C. Danto

with their inventories of minor aches and pains, and the cosmetic blemishes that make them, in at least their own minds, unattractive, and hence unlovable and lonely. Learning to dance presents itself as a way of overcoming the loneliness: one can hold a partner while the music plays, and feel the other’s warmth. Learning to paint by buying a kit and filling in the numbered areas on a canvas board with pigment is a pathetic effort at selfimprovement by acquiring an “accomplishment” that involves no talent whatsoever. It only underscores the distance between one’s life and that of the celebrities that makes one feel inferior. But even the celebrities are not that happy. Marilyn Monroe committed suicide the day that Warhol’s show at the Ferus Gallery closed. Warhol painted her beautiful head as if it were the head of a saint on a field of gold leaf in a religious icon. She was Saint Marilyn of the Sorrows. Her beauty was a mask. Warhol’s skills as a commercial artist stood him in good stead when he began to execute Marilyn Monroe paintings. He drew a frame around her head in a publicity photograph for the film
Niagara
and had it made into a silk screen. This, in effect, made her face into a mask, which he could reproduce over and over again. In fact, Warhol did twenty-four
Marilyn
paintings, the most spectacular of whichwas
Marilyn Diptych
, which was included in his first Stable Gallery show.
    The colors in
Marilyn Diptych
were garish—chrome yellow hair, chartreuse eye shadow, smeary red lipstick. There were two sets of twenty-five Marilyns, colored on the left, black and white on the right. The colored ones are fairly uniform, even if off register. The black-and-white ones show a certain variation. In the second row from the left, for example, the screen gets clogged with the black ink, as if a shadow had fallen over the star’s face. Then the features get paler and paler until, in the upper right corner, the face feels as if it is fading away from the world as we read across the diptych. It is like a graphic representation of Marilyn dying, without the smile leaving her face. In this respect the fifty faces of Marilyn Monroe is very different from the array of thirty-two
Campbell’s Soup Cans
, which are uniformly bright. There is no internal transformation. In
Marilyn Diptych
there is repetition, but it is a transformative repetition, in which the accidentalities of the silk-screen medium are allowed to remain, like the honks and squawks of a saxophone solo, in performances by John Coltrane.
    The one anomalous work was
129 Die.
It was the front-page photograph of a jet crash in the
New York Mirror
for June 4, 1962. Henry Geldzahler, the curator of contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum, brought it to Warhol, saying, “It’s enough life. It’s time for a little death.” He wanted Warhol to change from the celebrator of consumption to something deeper and more serious. Warhol was to spend much of the following year making Death and Disaster silk-screen paintings: car crashes, plane crashes, race riots, suicides, poisonings—the disasters we see on the evening news, or that get written about in the tabloids and then forgotten, as if violent deaths happened to others, to people we know nothing about. They are like illustrations to Marcel Duchamp’s mock epitaph—
D’ailleurs, c’est toujours les autres qui meurent
—“Anyway, it’s always the others who die.” Like the batter who dreams, over and over again, of a base hit or a strikeout, the disasters are repeated and repeated in a single frame, as if to dull the horror. You cannot die more than once—“After the first death there is no other,” as the poet Dylan Thomas wrote—though Warhol did in fact die twice. But what does it mean, showing people dying the same death over and over? Warhol used decorator colors for these paintings, lavender and rose and orange