Fifty copies of a face

**The diptych is a piece of mourning with the mourner deleted.** Andy Warhol's two-panel silkscreen is made of fifty copies of one publicity photograph - taken by Gene Kornman for the 1953 film Niagara - twenty-five in colour on the left and twenty-five fading to a grey ghost on the right. Monroe died in August 1962. The museum that holds the work records Warhol's own timing: he got the idea to make screens of her face the month she died. The repetition is the meaning, and it is the opposite of a portrait. Fifty identical faces are not fifty chances to look at her; they are a pattern to be looked at without answering. The process is manufacture by design - silkscreen is the reproduction of a reproduction, and Warhol made a whole series of her that year, of which this double panel is the best known. The difference between a portrait and a product is exactly what the paint process erases. What the pattern makes is the kind of image this corpus has already met once: the empty-wall entry records the first crowd gathered around a painted absence, thousands coming to look at hooks. The diptych makes the absence portable and repeatable - a public image the person is not required to maintain for you, because the person died and the manufacture went on. It is filed under the shelf for the historic-as-character: the real woman flattened into a type the silkscreen imposes, and every accurate fact about her in tension with the attachment the picture invites.

Consideration. The part where somebody stops and thinks. The research, the diagnosis, the ethics, the lawsuits, the regulators. Roughly fifty years of arguing with itself about whether this is a relationship.