The head and shoulders of a young woman shown against a solid, turquoise-green background fills this stylized, nearly square portrait painting. She faces and looks at us. Her face and neck is a field of orchid purple. Her eyelids are covered in crescent-shaped areas of turquoise above small areas of arctic blue, overlaid over the whites of her eyes and iris. Her full lips are covered with bright scarlet red. Black shading picks out her arched eyebrows, her heavy-lidded eyes, the shadow under her nose, her smiling mouth, the hollows under her high cheekbones and at her temples, and the shadow her chin casts on her neck. She has a mole between her left nostril and the left corner of her mouth, on our right. Her short, wavy hair is swept up from her forehead and overlaid with a field of canary yellow over the black shading that indicates curls along the sides of her face and along the back of her neck. A pear-shaped area of turquoise alongside her neck to our right could be the collar of her shirt. The turquoise background is flecked with a few black vertical lines, especially near the left edge.

Andy Warhol, Green Marilyn, 1962, acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, Gift of William C. Seitz and Irma S. Seitz, in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art, 1990.139.1

Contact: Art and the Pull of Print, Lecture 4: “Strain”

Jennifer L. Roberts, Harvard University

A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts

Sunday, May 16, 2021
8:00 a.m.

Virtual

The material and spatial changes of the printmaking process and their social and conceptual implications will be discussed in this lecture series.

Many modern printmaking processes involve passing ink or light through screens or meshes, especially when converting continuous-tone photographs into printable formats. These processes create the conditions in which most exchanges between the ink-world of print and the light-world of photography take place, and also link the practice of making images to a long history of straining, sifting, refining, and filtering in material and political realms beyond the art world.

Each lecture will premiere at the date and time listed on the Contact: Art and the Pull of Print web page and will remain there for public viewing. These programs are free and open to the public and designed for anyone interested in art and art history. No art or art history background is required. Ages 18 and up. No registration is required.