One of the more intellectually taxing activities of last week’s Cape Cod vacation (aside from trying to remember which day of the week it was, a glorious disassociation) was the assemblage of a 550-piece puzzle of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe.
An unconventional yet effective way to commune with a piece of art: Do a jigsaw puzzle of it. You’ll become painfully attuned to the colors, the depth, the contours. For instance, in the Marilyn puzzle, there is a maddening amount of red, white, and yellow, all of the same shade, with little differentiating features. I loved finding the twinkles in her eyes.
Our Marilyn puzzle is more pleasingly colored than the yellow-lipped, blue-faced, pink-haired, or decaying black-and-white Marilyns that comprised the original set of 13 Marilyns released in 1962. This web site lets you play with the color scheme of Warhol’s Marilyn print, and provides some history about Warhol’s silkscreening phase: “In August 62 I started doing silkscreens… you get the same image, slightly different each time. It was all so simple quick and chancy. I was thrilled with it. When Marilyn Monroe happened to die that month, I got the idea to make screens of her beautiful face the first Marilyns.”
The fact that Warhol also created silkscreens of objects of mass production (soup cans, Brillo pads) implies that this was no simple homage to Marilyn’s timeless beauty and mass appeal. Celebrities are manufactured, commodified, and accessible to us all. Everyone can get a bottle of Coke, a can of Campbell’s soup, or a Marilyn Monroe. (Incidentally, last month, “Lemon Marilyn” sold for $28 million dollars at a Christie’s auction).
In spite of (or because of?) all of the cultural cliches, it felt a lot more appropriate to do a Marilyn Monroe jigsaw puzzle rather than, say, a Mona Lisa jigsaw puzzle.
