When you think about the artist/celebrity who do you think of?
It might well be Andy Warhol.
Though maybe it’s a more recent star, like Grayson Perry or Tracey Emin, both of whom would probably acknowledge their debt to Warhol, the modern artist who probably did most to cultivate a persona and a mystique to complement and market his art.
He wasn’t the first though, and you’ll find a long line of artists with larger than life public images going back to the Renaissance, when the book, Lives of the Artsist by Giorgio Vasari, pioneered the idea that the people who make art might be as interesting as the art they make.
Warhol was a celebrity.
And he loved celebrity.
Over a huge volume of work - perhaps 10,000 to 19,000 pieces - Warhol often looked at and reflected on stardom and big personalities.
Here are just some examples of the people he found in the Hollywood spotlight and put in his lens.
Marilyn Monroe
The archetypal, best-known Warhol images are probably his many Marilyn pictures.
Many of them derived from this publicity shot, showcasing Warhol’s easy way with using images (he faced multiple copyright cases during his career).
Shot Sage Blue Marilyn is the most valuable Warhol ever, achieving $195 million in 2022.
(The series of images called “shot” because they were, by Dorothy Podber, a performance artist who pulled a gun on them on a visit to the Factory in 1964.
Liz Taylor
Considered one of the great Hollywood beauties, Liz Taylor was first painted by Warhol in 1963, and his 1964 series of prints is considered a breakthrough work for him.
Taylor was certainly a big star at the time. Cleopatra was the top-earning film of 1963 despite a monster-long, super-expensive shoot that had also resulted in a high-profile romance between Taylor and her co-star, Richard Burton. Cleopatra was knocked off the top of the American movie charts by another Taylor/Burton film, The VIPs.
Silver Liz realised $16 million in 2011. Image courtesy of Christie's.
Romance, illness (Taylor had nearly died from pneumonia in 1961), star power (she was the first $1 million-a-movie actress)...
She had everything for a Warhol star.
Again, Warhol took a PR picture - the way the studio wanted their star to be seen - and used it to his own ends.
Perhaps he enjoyed the contradiction of the film, BUtterfield 8, from which he took the image being one Taylor hated, but for which she won an Oscar.
An original painting in the Warhol Liz series has sold for $31.5 million in 2014. A Silver Liz made more than $16 million in 2011.
Grace Kelly
Grace Kelly in 1953, but Warhol used a film from very early in her career.
Warhol might have been fascinated too by the film from which he extracted the still for his 1984 Grace Kelly prints (typically, made not long after her death, in a car crash).
Fourteen Hours, from 1951, was Kelly’s debut.
It was a telling of a very famous New York tragedy, the 1938 jumping suicide of John William Warde. For long hours, Warde balanced on a ledge of the Gotham Hotel, resisting attempts to talk him down with the help of drugged water. He finally leaped to his death when a photographer took his picture as he started to step down from the ledge into a hotel room. The suicide became a spectacle with crowds of up to 5,000 surging in the streets under the hotel.
Kelly had a minor role in the film, and despite impressing her co-stars (“she didn’t have a bad side”) it didn’t lead to a major career breakthrough, while catching enough audience eyes to inspire the foundation of a Grace Kelly fanclub.
Her subsequent career, which she ended in order to marry Prince Rainer of Monaco, included a host of iconic roles including a number of roles for Alfred Hitchcock who framed her and costumed her obsessively.
But Warhol chose what was arguably a failure for the young actor and took a black and white movie and draped it in vibrant colours to show Kelly’s famous, luminous blonde hair.
Kelly was filmed in black-and-white for Fourteen Hours, but Warhol brought out her famous golden hair.
A Kelly print sold for $165,000 in 2024.
Ingrid Bergman
Bergman, the Swedish-born Hollywood star, died in 1982, and Warhol honoured her with a series of three portraits in 1983.
The idea was incubated in partnership with a Swedish gallery, whose owner, Per-Olov Börjeson brought up Bergman in a chat with the artist.
Critics find the portraits somewhat realistic and unsensational for Warhol, particularly the final image, which is simply titled “Herself”.
Ingrid Bergman as Herself by Andy Warhol. Critics find this image unusually personal and uninterested in artifice and image.
The other two show Bergman in two of her most famous roles.
She is Sister Mary Benedict in The Bells of St Mary’s, a musical comedy about a Catholic school, with songs largely sung by co-star Bing Crosby (though Bergman contributes a Swedish folk song, Vårvindar friska). If that sounds unlikely, the movie was a huge hit in 1945, when perhaps war-weary Americans wanted some heart-warming sentimentality.
The second shows Bergman “With hat” in what is probably now her most famous role, as Ilsa Lund in Casablanca. On the run from the Nazis with her resistance hero fiance, Ilsa finds herself stranded in North Africa and needing help from a man she loved and abandoned, Humphrey Bogart’s Rick. It’s one of the great movie love stories, and has grown in stature since its release in 1943.
The complete set is valued at an upper range of about $110,000.
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