Gold Marilyn Monroe and Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair - Essay Example

Academia - Research December 2009 If I loved you: Frida Kahlo and Marilyn Monroe Seeking Affection If they were not seeking affection, Marilyn Monroe and Frida Kahlo certainly sought attention. These two pictures seem at first to be opposites of each other. The object here is to show psychological similarities against the light of physical differences. Only one of these paintings is a self-portrait - or so it seems. Only one of these pictures is a woman as seen by a man - or so it seems. There are two invisible men here: the artists Diego Rivera and Andy Warhol. The objective is to make them visible. Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, by Frida Kahlo hangs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, currently on show among other masterpieces of the time. Kahlo painted this medium-sized canvas in 1940, shortly after her divorce from Diego Rivera. Theirs was a tempestuous relationship, shown by their remarriage the following year and the content of this picture, which shows Kahlo after she sheared off most of her long hair1. Many art critics have opinions about why she painted herself in such a masculine way: short hair, man’s suit, unladylike posture. It is perhaps to state that after her husband’s infidelity with her own sister Cristina, she was making herself unattractive, unfeminine and unapproachable. Others say she always had masculine tendencies, shown by her relationships with women. The truth lies somewhere between, more related to grief and mourning than to statements of gender. Kahlo was part Jewish. She was very close to her German-Jewish father Wilhelm Kahlo2, and was probably expressing the Jewish way of grieving something lost, something dead: her love. The verse from Jeremiah (Ch 7, v 29), in the Old Testament: ‘Shave your head in mourning, and weep alone on the mountains.’ And in Micah Ch 1:1, ‘Weep, you people of Judah! Shave your heads in sorrow...’3 are well known. It is almost certain Kahlo would have known this practice. Hairdressers in New York registered a great number of women wanting their hair cut short after the disaster of September 11, 2001.4 It is not uncommon for divorced women to get a short haircut. Rather than cutting of their noses to spite their faces, it is a public sign of sorrow and loss. Kahlo’s picture and its details are important: the cut hair lies all about and seems alive, like part of her, still crawling, in a large empty space that emphasizes her loneliness. The words of a song are on the wall, with music notes: a proclamation: ‘See, if I loved you, it was for your hair, Now you’re bald, I don’t love you anymore.’5 She says Rivera’s words for him. Although she is alone in the picture, Rivera is very much there: his presence is sensed by the viewer. This picture is all about him and the way he hurt Kahlo. Signs of his own style are there: broad simplified areas of color. ‘Diego showed me the revolutionary sense of life and the true sense of color,’ she said to a journalist in 1950.6 Fine brushstrokes delineate the dark hair and in the same way animate them. The music notes are exquisite and tiny: they are not angry slashes. The small scissors are not brutal shears, but silver and feminine. This is a deliberate, delicate, execution of simmering female anger coming from the sorrow of knowing a man does not love enough. The suit is large and baggy: it is one of her husband’s. It is well-known that Rivera was an elephant of a man. Kahlo says so herself in her diaries. Their union was described by many as a marriage ‘between an elephant and a dove’, and, ‘One had to see Diego move, an upright elephant, slow, graceful.’7 Wearing an ex-husband’s clothes, painted so carefully with ironed creases and turn-ups on the pants and wide lapels, is a not a symbol: it is a very real sign. The Jewish psychoanalyst Salomon Resnick8 calls it ‘... an identification, ... like wearing anothers clothing.’ There is great mental instability when a marriage ends. Despite the derailment, Kahlo recovered, regaining her fierce desire for autonomy. She was intensely conscious of her roots, of where she was coming from and who she was.9 Mental instability and Marilyn Monroe are often mentioned together. In his famous 1962 picture Gold Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol accomplished a number of things, least of which not being the creation of an arresting presence. But there is a hint of instability too. It is a very large canvas, which can scarcely be called a painting: ‘mixed media’ is how some curators would categorize it. In a vast expanse (nearly two square yards) of bronzish-gold polymer paint Warhol fixed a hand-colored portrait: larger than life in more than just a metaphorical sense. It is an enlargement of a black and white print he roughly tinted - in gauche abstract strokes, not staying inside the lines - with silkscreen ink. Turquoise for the eye shadow, yellow for the hair, an insipid pink for the skin, and a vapid garish red for the arresting mouth.10 Warhol and his portraits are a study in themselves. He delved into the psychology of fame and identity, taking icons of his time and producing repetitions that seemed obsessive, but were really an interpretation of the masses’ desires.11 This picture is a perfect instance of ‘a mass-produced image as the bearer of desires’12 and not much is made of the fact the portrait is a print of a proof from the last shoot before her suicide in 1962. It was one of the few portraits she liked and approved. Her rejection of many photographs, by gashing them roughly with a blue pencil or a nail file, is notorious.13 So this perhaps comes very close to being a self-portrait in that sense. It is a picture that Marilyn Monroe made hers, simply by not marking it across the face with a large X. By owning it with an imprimatur of acceptance, Monroe paved the way for Warhol, who took it and bent it to his own purposes. Many ascribe gender reasons for what he created. Gold Marilyn Monroe is understood by many to be a gay icon, or a dandified object 14. Perhaps it is the other way around: Monroe became a gay icon after Warhol dandified and turned this image into a ‘commodity’, as Glick calls it. The thought occurs to the viewer that the Gold Marilyn Monroe could be seen and interpreted as a portrait of Warhol himself. He is very much present, and the viewer feels he is there: just like Monroe in life, Warhol was overly self-conscious and a total social misfit. It is hard to imagine Monroe doing her shopping or washing, or Warhol paying his bills. They were so similar in psychology, lifestyle, notoriety and hang-ups that looking at this huge golden picture is like looking at both of them at once: artist and portrait superimposed into one entity. After his death, Warhol’s obsessive collections of found objects and everyday items figured him as eccentric: it was only a confirmation of what the world already knew about this artist. His Marilyns too, are a collection: like a broken record playing the same bit over and over again. Although he could not have seen her like a can of soup or a meaningless icon (an oxymoron to the careful observer),15 Marilyn and her painting had an effect on Warhol, and 1962 was his watershed year. From then on, he gathered style and gave the world what he became best known for.16 He went on to portray Elvis Presley and Marlon Brando in much the same way, but none have the immediate impact as the Gold Marilyn Monroe.17 It is probably because Warhol is not in those pictures himself: he is simply the portraitist, not the identifier / identified. These two portraits have a lot in common in spite of their differences. They were created over twenty years apart in different locations, by different artists. The motivation behind the brush, however, is startlingly and strikingly similar. In both the pictures death is present and looms large. Kahlo died shortly after her reunion with Rivera, but a reading of this picture in the light of her pain, disfigurement, suffering and death seem to be a continuation of the song on the wall. She said on her deathbed she wanted to go joyfully and never return.18 It was not a suicide note, but it feels as if she wanted an end to her suffering, both physical and emotional. Monroe chose her own time for exit, and death is very tangible in this last portrait. Although there are no words in the picture, the writing is metaphorically on the wall here too. It is a sustained ‘act of remembrance’19 by Warhol of a person who found it just as hard as he did to conform. Both the women in these portraits were misfits, both were desperate for affection. The last Marilyn Monroe movie had Misfits as the title, and filming it was probably what spurred on her death .20 They were both artists whose work wrung out their spirits. Kahlo’s self-portraits form the bulk of her work. She goes from picturing herself as a young ‘dove’ with centre-parted hair and a weak smile, to this exhibition of calm yet ruthless self-modification to prove a point. The women are not alone: two men have been made visible by the way their lives were inextricably linked through the stories behind the pictures. Self Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940) would never have been created in the absence of Diego Rivera. Gold Marilyn Monroe (1962) is part and parcel of what Andy Warhol was and did. * Works cited Bahney, Jennifer 2007 Cutting Hair as a Sign of Grief Long Hair Lovers’ Journal Vol 1 Baume, Nicholas and Sutton, Peter C. 1999 About Face: Andy Warhol Portraits (Essays) The Wadsworth Athenaeum/The Andy Warhol Museum/MIT Press Glick, Elisa 2009 Materializing Queer Desire: Oscar Wilde to Andy Warhol State University of New York Press Herrera, Hayden 2002 Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo Harper Perennial Michelson, Annette 2001 Andy Warhol (October Files) The MIT Press The Old Testament King James Version Resnick, Salomon 2005 Glacial times: A journey through the world of madness translated by Daniel Alcorn Hove: Routledge. 136 p. (Birksted-Breen D, editor. New Library of Psychoanalysis.) Taraborrelli, J. Randy 2009 The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe Grand Central Publishing Whittaker, Harry 2005 The Frida Kahlo Exhibition at the Tate Modern: A brief biography and review of her works In Defense of Marxism Read More