Andy WarholAndy Warhol was the most successful and highly paid commercial illustrator in New York even before he began to make art destined for galleries. Nevertheless, his screenprinted images of Marilyn Monroe, soup cans, and sensational newspaper stories, quickly became synonymous with Pop art.

He emerged from the poverty and obscurity of an Eastern European immigrant family in Pittsburgh, to become a charismatic magnet for bohemian New York, and to ultimately find a place in the circles of High Society. For many his ascent echoes one of Pop art's ambitions, to bring popular styles and subjects into the exclusive salons of high art. His elevation to the status of a popular icon represented a new kind of fame and celebrity for a fine artist.

Two main themes• Pop icons (Marilyn, Coca Cola, Campbell’s Soup…)

• Death and disasters (car accidents, electric chair)

They both are frank expressions of his sorrow at public events. Many scholars view them as some of the first expressions of 'compassion fatigue' - the way the public loses the ability to sympathize with events from which they feel removed. Still others think of his pictures as screens - placed between us and horrifying events - which attempt to register and process shock.

• In the early 1960s W. began to make paintings, such as Orange Disaster #5 (1963), with the serial application of images revolving around the theme of death. He began using the image of the electric chair in 1963, the same year as the two final executions in New York State.

• Over the next decade, he repeatedly returned to the subject, reflecting the political controversy surrounding the death penalty in America in the 1960s. The chair, and its brutal reduction of life to nothingness, is given a typically deadpan presentation by Warhol. The image of an unoccupied electric chair in an empty execution chamber becomes a poignant metaphor for death.

• this reiteration of the macabre also became the subject of print portfolios, as in Electric Chair (1971). “When you see a gruesome picture over and over again,” he commented, “it doesn’t really have any effect.” Yet Electric Chair, with its eponymous chair printed once on each of ten separate sheets of paper, belies this statement. The work speaks to the constant reiteration of tragedy in the media, and becomes, perhaps, an attempt to exorcise this image of death through repetition. However, it also emphasizes the pathos of the empty chair waiting for its next victim, the jarring array of colors only accentuating the horror of the isolated, expectant seat.

Soon after her tragic death in 1962, Warhol made a series of paintings paying tribute to Marilyn Monroe, the film star and sex symbol who had captured America’s imagination in films like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire. Warhol based this portrait on a publicity still from the 1953 film Niagara. He painted the background gold before silkscreening the boldly colored face in the center, adding black to show her features. Even as Warhol canonizes Monroe, he reveals her public persona as a carefully structured illusion.

“The rubber-stamp method I’d been using to repeat images suddenly seemed too homemade; I wanted something stronger that gave more of an assembly-line effect. With silkscreening you pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That way you get the same image, slightly different each time. It all sounds so simple—quick and chancy. I was thrilled with it.

Warhol took Marilyn Monroe as his subject in different mediums, silkscreening the actress’s image multiple times in a grid in bright colors and in black and white. By repeating Monroe’s image (and that of other celebrities) over and over again, Warhol acknowledged his own fascination with a society in which personas could be manufactured, commodified, and consumed like products.