Four Marlons
Four Marlons is a 1966 painting by American artist Andy Warhol. The work depicts four repeated portraits of actor Marlon Brando in his role as Johnny Strabler from the 1953 film The Wild One. The painting is characteristic of Warhol's exploration of celebrity culture and repetition in his 1960s work. In 2014, the painting sold for $69.6 million at Christie's, ranking it among the List of [most expensive paintings|most expensive paintings] ever sold.
Description
Measuring approximately 205.7 × 165.1 cm, Four Marlons features a grid of four nearly identical images of Brando's face and upper torso, rendered in silkscreen ink directly from a publicity still from The Wild One. By repeating this iconic image across a large raw canvas, Warhol transforms a mass-media photograph into a monumental portrait that reflects both the cult of celebrity and the mechanical reproduction techniques central to Pop art.Provenance and exhibitions
The work was previously in the collections of Swiss art gallery Thomas Ammann Fine Art, Italian art dealer Gian Enzo Sperone, and Swiss art dealer Bruno Bischofberger.Four Marlons has appeared in major exhibitions, including Andy Warhol: Portraits at the Seattle Art Museum and Denver Art Museum in 1976–77, as well as solo exhibitions at Zurich's Kunsthaus and international retrospectives at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Tate Modern, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2001–02. It was on display at the Spielbank Aachen in Aachen, Germany from 2003 to 2009. It was featured in the exhibition Le grand monde d'Andy Warhol at the Galeries nationales du Grand Palais in Paris from March to July 2009.