Andy Warhol's Marilyn Diptych (1962) puts one publicity photograph of the film star Marilyn Monroe on two canvases, fifty faces in all: color on the left, black and white on the right. Viewers usually read it as fame beside death, since Warhol began the series within weeks of her death in August 1962. The pairing, though, was a collector's idea, and the fading on the right comes from his printing method.
Each canvas holds twenty-five faces, and no two come out quite alike. The left side looks like an advertisement. The right side looks like a smudged newspaper picture.
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That reading is tidy: color on the left, death on the right, taken in order like a sentence. It assumes that Warhol planned it. He made two separate canvases.
Gregor Muir, who curated the Warhol show at Tate Modern, puts it plainly. The diptych "was put together not by Warhol, but by the collector."
I don't think that empties the work. I do think it changes who gets the credit for the story everyone tells about it.
The collector who made it a diptych
The collector was Emily Tremaine. She and her husband Burton were the first to buy the canvases.
Warhol, she recalled, "first showed us the black MARILYNS, and several pictures later the coloured one appeared." Then she spoke up: "I said I thought they should be presented as a diptych." Warhol answered: "gee whiz yes."
A diptych is a work in two panels meant to be seen together, and the word turned two canvases into one statement. Order matters, because color sits on the left and black on the right, and viewers read from left to right.
Swapped, the same canvases would tell the opposite story: a face coming out of the dark and into color. Nothing in the canvases themselves prefers one reading to the other.
What Warhol did decide was how the canvases were made, and the left one hides a print of her face under the paint.
What You'll Discover
What lies under the colors.
Whose photograph Warhol borrowed.
How the black side comes apart.
How the cleaning changed the canvases.
Where critics rank the diptych.