Another of Warhol’s silkscreen riffs on Edvard Munch’s prints, from the show that closed yesterday at Scandinavia House in New York.It was Warhol’s choice to combine the femme-fatale “Madonna" image with Munch’s self-portrait. The pairing gets at a couple of truths. First, that the self-created image of Munch as tortured artist is inseparable from the (impeccably) tortured art he produced – Warhol knowing more than most about such acts of artistic self-creation. Second, that a tortured woman is never without her torturer. (It’s easy to imagine this doubling as forensic: the crime-scene image of a rape victim paired with a mug shot of her rapist.) Again, Warhol, the consumate voyeur of others’ sexual politics, knew all about such ties.
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