Marilyn
James Rosenquist
American, 1933–2017
1974
A 1974 lithograph by James Rosenquist that collages and fragments the features of a film-era celebrity with bold type and airbrushed color to probe how mass media manufactures glamour.
It reads like a fractured billboard—soft-focus close-ups of a mouth and cheek are sliced and overlaid with stenciled letters, bands of color, and blurred gradients that alternately seduce and mechanically repeat the image.
By adopting commercial printing and billboard aesthetics, Rosenquist turns a familiar celebrity visage into a critique of advertising, mass reproduction, and the commodification of identity central to Pop Art.
Medium
Lithograph
Dimensions
composition 35 11/16 x 27 3/8" (90.6 x 69.5 cm)
sheet 41 11/16 x 29 3/8" (105.9 x 74.6 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Gift of Peterburg Press, Inc. in memory of Myron Orlofsky
Accession
450.1978
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
