Postcard print of one of Warhol's iconic Marilyn Monroe images, boldly signed in black marker at the foot by the artist. Monroe's face is rendered in shades of yellow and purple on a turquoise background.  Captioned on verso, postcard printed by Fernand Hazan in France, ca. 1980.  4.5 x 6 inches (11.4 x 15.2 cm.).

Marilyn Monroe was a legend when she committed suicide in August of 1962, but in retrospect her life seems a gradual martyrdom to the media and to her public. After her death, Warhol based many works on the same photograph of her, a publicity still for the 1953 movie Niagara. He would paint the canvas with a single color—turquoise, green, blue, lemon yellow—then silkscreen Monroe's face on top, sometimes alone, sometimes doubled, sometimes multiplied in a grid. In reduplicating this photograph of a heroine shared by millions, Warhol denied the sense of the uniqueness of the artist's personality that had been implicit in the gestural painting of the 1950s. He also used a commercial technique— silkscreening—that gives the picture a crisp, artificial look; even as Warhol canonizes Monroe, he reveals her public image as a carefully structured illusion.