Peter
Blake

*Shrine
to Marilyn Monroe, in a Texas Diner*

1989–90

Mixed
media on three panels

Overall:
125 × 447 × 26 cm

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
for 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.”

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