Created 1989-90.

In the centenary year of Marilyn Monroe’s birth, Peter Blake’s Shrine to Marilyn Monroe, in a Texas Diner (1989–90) takes on renewed resonance as one of the artist’s most ambitious meditations on celebrity, fandom and the afterlife of popular imagery. Monumental in scale, extending nearly four and a half metres in width, the work is among the largest and most complex constructions of Blake’s career.

Produced as the centre-piece of Blake’s exhibition Peter Blake: In Homage to Marilyn Monroe, held at Wetterling Gallery, Gothenburg, in May 1990, the work brings together the central elements of his practice: collage, assemblage, found imagery, printed ephemera, signage, collecting, popular culture and the devotional structure of the shrine. Doors, commercial graphics and assembled objects coalesce into an image-environment that extends the intimacy of Blake’s earlier constructions into something more expansive and spatially charged. In this respect, the work occupies an important position within his oeuvre, both as a synthesis of longstanding concerns and as a rare work of environmental ambition.

“[Peter Blake’s] attitude to the mass media is neither theoretical nor primitivistic; his art is a natural record of ‘people I like’, mounted in forms that combine the intimacy of tackboards with the impact of public signs. Blake works as a fan.” (Christopher Marton, ed., “The Ruralists”, *Art and Design*, no. 23, 1991, p. 36.)

Marilyn Monroe occupies a central place in the visual culture of the twentieth century, and in the history of Pop Art in particular. While artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein treated her image through repetition and mechanical reproduction, Blake’s approach is more accumulative, personal and devotional. Here, Monroe is not reduced to a single emblematic image but dispersed across a dense field of visual material: magazine covers, pin-ups, postcards, commercial graphics and fragments of Americana, through which her presence is continually reassembled.

Drawing on his own archive, supplemented by material acquired for the project, Blake constructs a work that functions simultaneously as archive, shrine and environment. The Texas diner setting places the work within a recognisable American vernacular: commercial, nostalgic and cinematic, while the structuring motif of the shrine introduces a quieter devotional register. Monroe appears both as endlessly reproducible image and as the focus of sustained attention, suspended between the public circulation of her image and a more private mode of regard.

Produced for the Wetterling exhibition, the present work was the largest of the group. It was subsequently exhibited at the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva, and the Djanogly Art Gallery, Nottingham. Within Blake’s oeuvre, Shrine to Marilyn Monroe, in a Texas Diner occupies an exceptional position: a work in which scale, subject, method and emotional charge are brought into unusually close alignment. Within the wider artistic engagement with Marilyn Monroe, it offers a distinctive and sustained exploration of her image as both cultural icon and object of private devotion.

The work belongs to Blake’s wider Déjà vu project, in which the artist returned to earlier motifs, formats and subjects from his own career. This return was not nostalgic repetition, but a deliberate reoccupation of artistic territory that he had helped to define in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Marco Livingstone, the renowned expert on Pop Art, has elaborated:

“Keen to reclaim artistic territory that he had made his own in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Blake set himself the task in the late 1980s of producing new variants on his groundbreaking Pop works. These pictures, many of them collage based, were a riposte to the appropriationist tendencies that were much to the fore during the decade that was then ending... In his catalogue note for Déjà vu at the Nishimura Gallery in Tokyo in May 1988, the exhibition at which these cheeky self-quotations were first shown, he remarked that it was ‘better to have ripped myself off, than to have been “ripped off”’. So it was that he revisited some of the many inventive solutions to picture-making, as well as favoured images, that were by then firmly established as key elements of his aesthetic repertoire and personal iconography... There is a great deal of paradoxical play, humour and wit in these works: paintings combining boldly coloured formal devices with found photographs and postcards, wholly hand painted pictures masquerading as sign paintings and found objects, weather-beaten found objects presented within a new framework and with typographic additions as original paintings, and assemblages of ready-made objects such as toys and ephemera showcased in cabinets of his own making.

The Déjà vu series proved to be perfectly timed for a resurgence of interest in Pop Art, and for the influence of its methods on the work of the Young British Artists that he was soon to count among his friends, including Damien Hirst, Gavin Turk, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas.

Buoyed by the critical and commercial success of the Tokyo exhibition and by his joy in taking up many strands of his youthful work that he found still contained many unexplored possibilities, Blake embarked on a second exhibition of new works, this time for the Wetterling Gallery in Gothenburg, Sweden in May 1990, focused exclusively on images ‘in homage to Marilyn Monroe’.

Raiding his collection of old magazines, postcards and secondhand Americana and purchasing new material specifically for this purpose, he returned in particular to the language of the Pop collage paintings that remained among his most radical artistic statements. This time, however, he expressed his ambition in a dramatic increase in scale from those early, intimately sized, objects.

Shrine to Marilyn Monroe, in a Texas Diner, by far the largest of the works made for the Wetterling exhibition, moves into an environmental scale reminiscent of the walk-in environments of Ed and Nancy Kienholz.

Its closest equivalent in terms of scope and size, a shrine to Elvis Presley housed within a garden shed, was conceived at that time but abandoned once the artist noticed that sheds were becoming a cliché in contemporary art installations. A devotion to the dazzling beauty and glamour of the actress who had also been celebrated by Blake’s rival Andy Warhol here takes on a manic energy, her features repeated across the wall of a blue-collar eatery with the fervour that a devout Catholic might expend on a home-made oratory to a favourite saint.

Given Marilyn’s tragic early end by suicide in 1962, the suggestion of a private passion within the secular context of contemporary commercial society adds a melancholy poignancy to an otherwise joyful and nostalgic celebration of one of the great stars of our age.”

Created as a corner piece, Blake has nevertheless given "his blessing" for the three panels to be hung along a single wall if required. 

We are very grateful to Marco Livingstone for preparing this catalogue entry.