Shot Marilyns

Shot Marilyns is a series of silkscreen paintings produced in 1964 by Andy Warhol, each canvas measuring 40 inches square, and each a portrait of Marilyn Monroe. History Pop artist Andy Warhol had a fascination with Hollywood and fame. A legend of the silver screen, Marilyn Monroe is widely considered to be the epitome of Hollywood glamour. After her death at the age of 36 in August 1962, Warhol began immortalizing her in his work. "In August '62 I started doing silkscreens.... It was all so simple-quick and chancy. I was thrilled with it. My first experiments with screens were heads of Troy Donahue and Warren Beatty, and then when Marilyn Monroe happened to die that month, I got the idea to make screens of her beautiful face — the first Marilyns." In 1964, Warhol created portraits of Monroe based on a publicity photo for her 1953 film Niagara. He painted five Marilyn silkscreen portraits with different colored backgrounds: red, orange, light blue, sage blue, and turquoise, and stored them at The Factory, his studio on East 47th Street in Manhattan. Shooting Dorothy Podber, a performance artist and friend of Factory photographer Billy Name, saw the recently completed paintings stacked against one another at the studio and asked Warhol if she could shoot them. Believing that she intended to photograph the paintings, Warhol agreed. Podber doffed her pair of black gloves, withdrew a small revolver from her purse, and fired a shot into the stack of four paintings, which became known as The Shot Marilyns. The fifth painting with the turquoise background was not in the stack.