Martial Raysse (b. 1936)
Marilyn Martial
1962
Mixed media (acrylic, xerography, collage of colored paper, boa, pom-pom, pinned plastic fly)
on canvas.
Signed and dated “Martial Raysse 62” and titled “Marilyn Martial” on the reverse.
8 1/2 x 13 1/2 in. (21.5 x 34.5 cm.)
With box: 16 x 21 1/4 x 2 3/8 in. (41 x 54 cm x 6 cm.)
- Provenance: - Collection Madeleine Everaert, 8 Avenue de Sumatra, Bruxelles - Binoche, October 25, 1976 (label on the reverse) - Exhibition: - "Martial Raysse", Palais des Beaux- Arts, Brussels, March 9-April 2, 1967 (exhibition label on the reverse) - Literature: - "Martial Raysse", Palais des Beaux- Arts, Brussels, March 9-April 2, 1967, no.11 (p.10. and 14). - This work is registered in the Martial Raysse archives: IMR-0079
“In 1961, I made, as my contribution to that year’s Biennale de Paris, something that I called a “display.” It was like a portion of a supermarket with all the stuff that you would find there, and it included a photograph of a young woman, with a plastic body, a hat, and this and that. When I saw this, I started to make a little painting of the girl in the hat, and that was my first portrait. […] But when we had the show in 1962 at Sidney Janis—the New Realists show—they forbid me to show this little portrait. They fought with me because they thought that I had touched the object too much, and they were fanatics about Marcel Duchamp’s “readymade.” So they forbid me to show this portrait. When I arrived at the show, maybe one hour before it opened, suddenly Andy Warhol’s accumulation of Marilyn Monroes showed up. The paint was still wet, it was extraordinary. It’s too bad that I have no documentation, because that was the first time I saw a Warhol, and for a long time everybody thought I was a follower of Warhol, which is not the case. We arrived at this way of working at around the same time, and unaware of one another.” (Martial Raysse, interview in The Brooklyn Rail by Alex Bacon, April 2018).
In his 1962 posthumous portrait of Marilyn, unlike Andy Warhol’s fascination with celebrity and his use of the immediate impact of the star’s face, Martial Raysse maintains a much more critical distance. In his work, the idol is remote by decoloration and desecrated by the kitsch of hyper-saturated colors and store-bought trinkets (more reminiscent of Rauschenberg’s “combine paintings”).
The missing eye and the plastic fly, that prefigure his masterpiece “Made in Japan – La Grande Odalisque” (1964), also aim to underline the artificiality of celebrity, consumer culture and modernity, in an esthetic that Raysse called “hygiène de la vision”.
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