Extracts from the
Tate Modern tour
Andy Warhol Marilyn Diptych, 1962
“By repeating the image of Marilyn, Warhol is drawing attention to the way she is always present in the media, and indeed how images of celebrities in general are constantly in the public eye. The repetition also relates to the sequence of frames in a movie, here frozen in time. The difference between the two halves — over-coloured on the left, black and white on the right — could also refer to Marilyn’s life and death, particularly as the imagery fades away on the right-hand side.”
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Bathers at Moritzburg, 1909/26
“Max Pechstein, artist and friend of Kirchner, wrote in his diaries how the artists and their models were caught by a local policeman: ‘The girls quickly put on their bath robes. It didn’t help at all trying to explain that painting figures in the nude was a professional artistic activity’.”
Joan Miró Une étoile caresse le sein d’une négresse, 1938
“The symbols Miró used in his work are abstract, but they all have a basis in things he’d observed. Here the words not only come from the first line of an erotic poem Miró wrote himself, but he paints them as a sort of visual caress of the canvas. The two inverted triangles are a sign he commonly used to stand for a woman. The thick wavy line represents a man — his father sported a moustache this shape.”