Lips

Lips—vehicles for communication and seduction—have always been a subject of fascination for Andy Warhol. Whether depicting Marilyn Monroe or Chairman Mao, Warhol often added a wash of technicolor lipstick to his celebrity portraits. Fixated with this element of the face, Warhol also portrayed lips alone. In Marilyn’s Lips (1962), the Pop artist reproduced the actress’s floating mouth 168 times on a single diptych. Warhol later created extensive collages of smiles, smirks, frowns, and pouts enlarged from Polaroids he snapped of subjects who sat for his commissioned portraits. Warhol originally released his collection as three bound albums containing over 60 different pairs of disembodied lips, printed onto various types of adhesive tape and applied to the album’s pages like kisses.