SFMOMA, Part 30: Floor 4, Ways of Seeing: Fourteen Artists.
She is still here, twenty-four years later, and she is coming through wrong.
Nine Marilyns fill the canvas in a three-by-three grid, and every one of them is a negative. Where the famous 1960s Marilyns were hot pink lips and yellow hair on flat bright ground, these are inverted: the highlights have gone black, the shadows push forward in electric color, the whole face lit from inside like something developing in a darkroom tray. Marilyn Monroe's smile is the most reproduced smile of the twentieth century, and Warhol has run it backward — the same woman, the same publicity still, but now she looks like a memory of herself, or a ghost caught on film.
Andy Warhol, Nine Marilyns [Reversal series], 1979/1986 — acrylic paint and silkscreen ink on linen, 54 3/8 × 41 3/4 in. (138.2 × 106.2 cm). The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at SFMOMA. On view on Floor 4 in Ways of Seeing: Fourteen Artists, part of Reimagined: The Fisher Collection at 10. Entry included with general admission (SFMOMA, 151 Third Street; Mon–Tue 10–5, Wed closed, Thu 12–8, Fri–Sun 10–5).
The easy reading is: late Warhol, running out of ideas, remixing his greatest hits. But the subject is sharper than that. The Reversal series is Warhol doing to himself what he spent the 1960s doing to everyone else — appropriating, repeating, hollowing out — and the target he chose was the image that made him famous. This is the artist stealing from the artist, and finding that the theft reveals something the original hid.
1962: The first Marilyn
The image started with a death. Marilyn Monroe died on August 5, 1962, and within weeks Warhol had taken a cropped publicity still from her 1953 film Niagara — Gene Korman's photograph, the smiling blonde with the parted lips — and begun silkscreening it in every color he could mix. The 1962 Marilyns are the founding documents of Pop celebrity: the first proof that a movie star's face could be treated the way a soup can was treated, as a unit of visual currency, repeatable without limit.
Warhol painted Marilyn for the rest of his life, in a sense. She recurs in the 1967 portfolio, in the late society portraits' DNA, in every silkscreened face that followed. She was his first famous dead woman, and he never really left the room where he made her.
1979–1986: The reversal
The Reversal series works like this: Warhol took his own classic images — Marilyn, Mao, the flowers — and printed them as tonal negatives, as if you were looking at a photographic negative held up to the light. Art historian David Bourdon, writing in 1989, nailed what happens: "As if the spectator were looking at photographic negatives, highlighted faces have gone dark while former shadows now rush forward in electric hues. The reversed Marilyns, especially, have a lurid otherworldly glow, as if illuminated by internal footlights."
Stay with that phrase: illuminated by internal footlights. The 1960s Marilyns were lit by the world — by flashbulbs, by fame, by the hot bright machinery of Hollywood. The reversed Marilyns are lit from inside the picture, by nothing external at all. The glamour has curdled into something stranger and more private. She is still smiling, but the smile no longer belongs to a person. It belongs to an image that has been copied so many times it has started to dream.
The curator and critic Germano Celant saw the deeper move: "He constructed the décor of himself and, to renew its appearance, he only needed to cast a mirror-image of it (a reversal)." Warhol had spent two decades appropriating other people's images — soup cans, Brillo boxes, newspaper photographs of car crashes and electric chairs. By the late seventies, the most available image to appropriate was his own. The Reversals are self-cannibalism as a business strategy and as a philosophy: the culture had finished consuming Marilyn, so Warhol consumed Warhol.
The grid, again
Nine of them, three by three. The multiplication is the point, and it always was. One Marilyn is a portrait; nine is a system. But notice what the reversal does to the repetition: in the 1960s versions, the repeated faces feel like products on an assembly line, identical and cheerful. Here, the repeated faces feel like frames of surveillance footage, or like the same dream recurring. The grid that once celebrated mass production now reads as obsession. He could not stop printing her. The image had outlived the woman by a quarter century, and it was still generating new versions of itself.
There is a market footnote that proves the point better than any criticism. In 2011, a Nine Multicolored Marilyns from this same Reversal series sold at Sotheby's London for £4.56 million — this at a moment when the art world had supposedly decided late Warhol was a decline. The market, which is never sentimental, looked at the negatives and saw the future: the image of the image, fame eating its own tail, the exact condition of the internet age, painted five years before the web existed.
The show, again
Stand close to the SFMOMA canvas and the reversal does something physical to your eyes. The black areas are matte and depthless — they absorb light — while the colored shadows seem to hover a millimeter above the linen. It is the opposite of how a normal painting works, where light falls on the surface from the room. Here the light comes from inside the face. Marilyn glows the way a phone screen glows in a dark bedroom: self-illuminated, slightly toxic, impossible to look away from.
Then step back and count. Nine smiles. The same smile, nine times, each one a negative of a negative of a photograph of a woman who died in 1962. Somewhere in that chain of copies, the person dropped out entirely, and what is left is pure signal — beauty as information, fame as a file format. Warhol didn't predict the age of the endlessly reposted image. He built it, one silkscreen at a time, and then he reversed it, just to show you what was underneath.
Which was nothing. Which was everything. 🌁
Timeline — Andy Warhol
1953 — Gene Korman photographs Marilyn Monroe for the film Niagara; the cropped still will become Warhol's source
1962 — Monroe dies, August 5; Warhol begins the first silkscreened Marilyns within weeks
1967 — The Marilyn portfolio; the image enters mass circulation as print
1979–1986 — The Reversal series: Warhol reprints his own classic images as tonal negatives
1987 — Warhol dies, February 22, New York
1989 — David Bourdon publishes the "internal footlights" reading of the Reversals
2011 — A Nine Multicolored Marilyns (Reversal Series) sells at Sotheby's London for £4.56 million
Today — Nine Marilyns [Reversal series] on view, 151 Third Street