Andy Warhol, Marilyn Reversal, 1979
03 June 2026
Many artists with a significant place within the pantheon of art history have an associated material or technique that they perfected or revolutionised. For Andy Warhol, arguably the most important—and certainly the most recognisable—artist of the latter half of the 20th century, it’s the silkscreen. A method of instant and unlimited reproduction, a way of turning an image into an icon. The silkscreen wasn’t just another tool for Warhol—it was an embodiment of his art and philosophy.
Warhol was interested in how people, things and, above all else, images become iconic; the way in which a culture becomes obsessed with an image, and the image in turn comes to define a culture. This interest drew his sights (and, indeed, his screen) to subjects including the Campbell’s soup can, the dollar sign and Mickey Mouse. But none of his images made quite the same impact as his Marilyn Monroe portraits did. After Monroe’s death in 1962, Warhol became fixated on her, repeating the image seen here for the remainder of his career.
Marilyn Reversal, a monochromatic, colour-reversed portrait of one of Warhol’s best-known subjects printed over a storm of gestural abstraction, could be thought of as an homage not only to Monroe but also to his silkscreen method.
A silkscreen’s transparent areas translate to opaque areas in the image that it creates, making screen printing the art of reversal. Here, we see what one of Warhol’s screens—the tools that created the most desired artworks of his generation—would have looked like.
The impact of this reversal is to affirm to the viewer what Warhol already knows: that the image of Monroe is robust and recognisable enough to survive the significant distortion that he applies. When we look at this work, we recognise Monroe instantly. It’s only on closer inspection that we realise how little visual material we have to go on: four colour-filled orbs representing eyes, nose and mouth framed by just-visible suggestions of curls of hair.
This work was originally given to Warhol’s friend and contemporary, the Abstract Expressionist painter Paul Jenkins (1923-2012), as a wedding present. Jenkins himself was another subject of Warhol’s—another potential icon to be immortalised by the screen that created icons. Such was Warhol’s method, freezing his subjects in time as totemic images that would become immortal, even if their subjects wouldn’t. “The idea is not to live forever,” as Warhol famously once said, “it is to create something that will.”1
Andy Warhol's Marilyn Reversal (1979) will be exhibited in the upcoming Opera Gallery exhibition 'The Monaco Masters Show, American 80s: from Warhol to Basquiat' in Monaco from 3 July to 3 October 2026.
1Quoted in Jaime Weinstein, “Pop Goes Dior”, Eidce, Winter Issue 2012–2013, p. 111
