Russell Young Marilyn Crying - New York For Sale

About this work

Marilyn Crying – New York (2013) is an enamel screenprint on linen by Russell Young, produced as a unique impression in Bondi Blue and Black with diamond dust—a work that brings the artist’s singular approach to bear on one of the most loaded subjects in the history of popular cultural representation. Measuring an imposing 62 by 48 inches (157.5 x 121.9 cm), the work presents Marilyn Monroe in a moment of raw and undisguised emotion: not the radiant, performing glamour of her most celebrated images, but the vulnerability that lay beneath it. Young’s choice to depict this version of Monroe—weeping, unguarded, privately human—gives the work a psychological charge that distinguishes it sharply from the more celebratory imagery that has dominated her representation. The material choices Young makes in this work amplify its emotional complexity. The palette of Bondi Blue and Black—cool, sharp, and dramatically contrasted—creates a visual world of striking chromatic authority, while the application of diamond dust across the linen surface introduces an element of paradox: glamour applied to a moment of pain, luxury given to vulnerability, beauty inseparable from sadness. It is a combination that captures something essential about Monroe’s cultural meaning—about the way in which public image and private experience were so catastrophically entangled in her life. Russell Young’s practice, rooted in his earlier career as a photographer of musicians and celebrities, consistently explores the gap between public persona and private reality in the figures who inhabit our collective imagination. Marilyn Crying – New York is one of his most powerful and emotionally direct statements of that inquiry—a work whose scale, material richness, and psychological acuity combine to create an image that extends the long and complex cultural conversation about Monroe’s life and legacy in new and genuinely moving directions. As a unique impression, each surface is inimitable.