1971 Tate Gallery exhibition booklet, signed on the cover by the American artist and the founder of pop art, over the cover image of his "Marilyn Monroe." Color and black-and-white photographs. Square 8vo (8 ¼ x 8 ¼”). 100pp. Index printed on magenta paper. With three original gallery ticket stubs laid inside. Matted and framed under UV Plexi to 17 x 17 inches (43 cm x 42 cm) overall. 

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.