Stars of The Silver Screen

Warhol's The Star is based on Greta Garbo in her role as the seductive and enigmatic spy in Mata Hari (1931), one of the films that helped define her extraordinary screen persona during the golden age of Hollywood. By the time Warhol included her within the Myths portfolio in 1981, Garbo had long since withdrawn from public life, becoming a figure of near-total cultural mythology since she retired from the film industry in 1941. Few stars of the 20th century cultivated such an aura of emotional privacy and mystery. Her refusal to remain publicly visible only intensified her legend.

In Mata Hari, Garbo appears at the height of her hypnotic powers. Playing the infamous exotic dancer and double agent, she moves through the film draped in jewels, veils and theatrical glamour, simultaneously desired but unattainable. The role crystallised many of the qualities that audiences came to associate with Garbo herself, including sensuality, passion and a certain aloofness. Unlike later celebrities whose fame depended upon their constant visibility, Garbo's mystique was built upon withholding her image. She remained perpetually out of reach.

Warhol created Jane Fonda in 1982 for the Friends of Tom Hayden, the political organisation of Fonda's then-husband, the prominent antiwar activist and California state senator. It captures her at one of the most complicated moments in American public life, a woman simultaneously at the apex of Hollywood stardom and the centre of fierce political controversy. Fonda had won Academy Awards for Klute (1971) and Coming Home (1978), but it was her 1972 visit to North Vietnam, when she was photographed seated on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun, that defined how a significant portion of America saw her. The controversial nickname 'Hanoi Jane' followed her for decades.

Warhol, who photographed Fonda personally for this portrait in 1982, was fascinated by the intersection of celebrity and politics, a territory he had explored in his portraits of Mao Zedong and Ronald Reagan. In Jane Fonda, he celebrates her for the same confrontational approach which made her such a renowned activist at the time, and still today in her ninth decade. This is a woman who used her fame as a platform for activism. In 1982, she launched the first of her exercise videos, creating yet another remarkable cultural phenomenon. Warhol’s portrait celebrates, without equivocation, a woman who simultaneously represents Hollywood glamour and staunch political defiance. Stripping away unnecessary detail, Warhol elevates her into an icon of the public arena. Jane Fonda is his celebration of fame, empowerment and fearless individuality.

Ingrid Bergman was undoubtedly one of the most celebrated female actors of the 1940s, starring in Casablanca (1942), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), and Gaslight (1944), for which she won her first Academy Award. Then, in 1949, she fell in love with Italian director Roberto Rossellini on the set of Stromboli, left her husband and daughter and moved to Italy. The subsequent fallout and damage to her reputation were immense and highly sensationalised, with one US Senator even denouncing her on the floor of Congress as 'a powerful influence for evil' and 'a vile free-love cultist'. She was all but exiled from Hollywood for nearly a decade. Her plight has become a fable for the chauvinism and hypocrisy that existed in mid-century Hollywood.

Bergman returned to America in 1956, won her second Academy Award for Anastasia and was welcomed back with remarkable warmth; a testament both to her talent and her public popularity. She continued working until shortly before she died in 1982, on her 67th birthday. Warhol's Ingrid Bergman portfolio of 1983, comprising Herself, The Nun and With Hat, draws on three distinct registers of her image, including the private woman, the pious character, and the sophisticated European icon. Together they constitute a portrait of extraordinary range, suggesting a subject who could not be reduced to a single image or a single story. Ingrid Bergman: Herself holds a particularly quiet power, stripping away the glamour of the Hollywood star to leaving something more intimate. This was a woman who had been made and unmade by the machine of the industry, and had survived it all with extraordinary composure.

In 1985, Warhol appropriated the poster image from the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause, featuring James Dean, transforming a commercial image into a work of art. This work comes from the Ads series, a portfolio of artworks inspired by iconic, widely disseminated advertisements created during the mid-20th century. Within the series, this work marks the artist’s return to the primary themes of his oeuvre, including icons of popular culture and stars of the silver screen, and recalls some of his most famous paintings that depicted the brooding figures of Elvis and Marlon Brando. Among all these portraits of Hollywood stars, Warhol revealed a fascination with gendered rebellion, sexual ambiguity, and a non-conformist view of the outlaw archetype.

The artist’s selection of the image carries a haunting sense of mortality, alluding to the actor’s premature death at the height of fame. Sharing the same narrative as his Marilyn series of portraits in the 1960s, Warhol addresses fame and death through the lens of mass culture. Here, James Dean appears twice in the image: posing against the wall and again as a spectral silhouette, as though the soul has been separated from the body. The artwork serves as a Warholian memento mori; the actor is both an icon of the 20th century and a reminder of the fragility of life.

Like Rebel Without a Cause (James Dean), Warhol’s Van Heusen (Ronald Reagan) forms part of the artist’s Ads portfolio. Prior to becoming the 40th President of the United States of America in 1981, Ronald Reagan enjoyed a successful career as an actor in film and television. He began his career as a sportscaster before relocating to Los Angeles in the hopes of finding film work. Serendipitously, his first role was a radio announcer in Love is in the Air (1937). This jump-started his silver-screen career, which would eventually span over thirty years and more than fifty film credits, including 11 Oscar-nominated films. Kings Row (1942) is considered Regan’s most celebrated performance, where he stars as Drake McHugh, a character who loses his legs after an accident. The film received four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director.

For this work, Warhol resurrected an image from a 1950s advertisement for Van Heusen Century Shirts, featuring Reagan, who was then a spokesman for the brand. Here, Warhol represented the image as if in Technicolor vision. Although the advertisement had since faded into obscurity, Reagan’s cheerful endorsement that the shirts, ‘Won’t Wrinkle Ever!’ appealed to Warhol’s own witty sense of humour.