GOOD CATHOLIC BOY

Traditionally, icons evoke a reaction on a spiritual level. As a devout Byzantine Catholic, Warhol had grown up transfixed by glittering images of Christ and the Madonna. He knew the sacred power invested in an image. His prints of Marilyn Monroe, Mao Zedong and Liz Taylor share the same composition, the same back-lighting and reduced outlines as the saints of the Catholic Church. Theirs were the original fetishised bodies: objectified and worshipped; dismembered and preserved; elevated to divine status and immortalised as icon.When Warhol created his Marilyn prints in the months following her death in 1962, he chose an image that exuded her sex-goddess persona, not the suicidal, desperate woman she really was. He reduced her to a few defining features, the essence of the Marilyn brand, to be mass-produced. We prefer the object, the copy. The image distances us from the reality. Marilyn's suicide and the suffering of martyrs alike are subsumed by the glamour of the image.

-Telegraph
Sept 20 2009