Marilyn Monroe III

Marilyn Monroe's face may be the most familiar in the world, and Andy Warhol made sure of that. In 1967 he returned to an image he had first used five years earlier, right after the star's death in 1962. Working from a single publicity photo taken for the film Niagara, he reprinted her face using silkscreen, swapping the colors around with each version. This one gives her green skin, golden curls, and hot pink lips floating against a mellow green background. The tones look almost wrong, like ink that slipped during printing, but Warhol chose every off-kilter shade on purpose.

As a driving force behind Pop Art, Warhol loved pulling images straight from advertising, movie posters, and supermarket shelves and calling them art. Repeating Marilyn like a stamped-out product was his way of poking at fame itself and how we treat famous people as things to be packaged and sold. Beneath the candy colors sits a quieter sadness, since he made these portraits so soon after she died. He famously said he wanted to be a machine, and this cool, factory-style approach leaves the meaning open. Tribute, criticism, or a mix of the two, the choice is yours.