Jonathan Jones, art critic for The Guardian, includes Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych in his list of the Top 10 Unforgettable Faces in Art, alongside the Mona Lisa, Nefertiti, Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring, and Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream.’
“Is Marilyn’s face unforgettable, or is it already fading? Warhol’s eerie Diptych – a diptych is a two-panelled alterpiece in medieval art – asks this by contrasting two sets of screenprinted images. In one grid of repeated portraits Marilyn’s face is preserved in lurid colours, as bright and permanent as a golden death mask. In the other, her beauty decays before our eyes, lost in the copying process, preserved only as a crude inadequate trace of the beauty that has died.”