Andy Warhol Marilyn Monroe I Love your Kiss Forever Forever For Sale

Marilyn Monroe I love Your Kiss Forever Forever is a lithograph published in a 1964 book, 1¢ life. The double-page spread featuring five repeated pictures of the actress’s lips is the very first example of Warhol depicting Marilyn Monroe, making it intrinsically valuable and rare. 

Few twentieth century portraits can rival the iconoclasm of Warhol’s Marilyn portfolio, the seeds of which are clearly seen in Marilyn I love Your Kiss Forever Forever. The present work was created two years after her death, and disembodies one of the actress’s most recognisable features – her lips - to convey the sensuality she represents. Warhol has also manipulated the photograph in a seemingly infinite number of ways: cropped and recoloured, blurred and out of focus, it is instilled with a feeling of chaos and danger, heightened by the suggestive nature of Marilyn’s lip-biting. Across the bottom of the spread’s pages is a the text of a poem, Wallasse Ting’s ‘Jade White Butterfly’. Aligned with Warhol’s carefully mediated narrative of seduction, Ting’s poem concerns a nude woman, and evokes a sexual undertone (‘walk under green sunshine, sleep naked top roof). Although ambiguous, the poem alludes to Monroe who famously claimed to sleep naked, wearing only Chanel No.5. 

The artist’s preoccupation with Marilyn Monroe arguably goes deeper than a surface exploration of sexuality. In Marilyn Monroe I love your Kiss Forever Forever’s fragmentation and duplication of imagery, Warhol expresses how deeply entrenched her image is in the mind of the viewer. It is a repetition that mirrors the very real pace with which the actress’s image was produced thousands of times in publications, the very source material for Warhol’s pictures. 

This print has a firm place in setting the precedent for a prolific series of works featuring Marilyn and other key figures in twentieth century such as Jacqueline Kennedy and Elizabeth Taylor.