Marilyn Monroe died tragically from an overdose of sleeping pills on 5 August 1962, the same month that Warhol started doing silkscreens. Between then and the end of the year he made at least twenty-three paintings of her using a silkscreen technique, all based on the same photograph, a 20th Century Fox still taken by Gene Kornman as publicity for the film Niagara of 1953. Some are in colour and some just in black and white.

The present work, which consists of two panels, the left-hand one in colour and the right-hand in black and white, each panel with twenty-five images in five rows, is the largest of his early paintings of her and is usually regarded as the culmination of the series. Mrs Burton Tremaine, who with her husband bought it from him in 1962, soon after it was completed, recalls:

'We bought the picture directly from Andy Warhol at his Studio, before he had a dealer. I think it was Ivan Karp who urged us to go to Warhol's house on Lexington Avenue. His house was opposite a supermarket, and the soup cans were quite visible from his front entrance. Andy had two stereo machines running at high pitch, one playing Bach, the other Rock. Andy himself was the only low key note in the Studio. He seemed shy and it took a bit of coaxing before he showed us everything, and we bought several pieces that day. He first showed us the black MARILYNS, and several pictures later the coloured one appeared. I said I thought they should be presented as a diptych, Andy replied “gee whiz yes” so he brought back the black one, stood it next to the coloured one and we all saw we had achieved a very complex and moving statement about MARILYN so I really felt I was a collaborator! And, of course, we bought them both.’ (Letter of 22 September 1982.)

Because of its size the Tremaines were not able to hang it in their home very often, so they lent it for most of the time from 1970 onwards to the Wadsworth Atheneum at Hartford, Connecticut, where their son was President for several years. Included in the exhibition Printed Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in the early part of 1980, it was withdrawn from the exhibition early, at the end of March, for inclusion in Major Works of the '60s at the Pace Gallery, which was a show of works from the Tremaines's collection.

Published in:
The Tate Gallery 1980-82: Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions, London 1984